The Olympics is an annual bit of chaos, where computer science graduate
students joyfully prevent each other from doing work for about a week and a
half in January.
Students and faculty are divided into four
teams. They compete in various events that uncover unknown, innate
talents such as the ability to throw a frisbee down a hallway without
tripping the fire alarm and the ability to drop a rubber ball down a
narrow stairwell.
The AI Olympics has been a fixture at the AI Lab for many years. With
the merger with LCS, 2008 is the fifth edition of the CSAIL Olympics.
While the games are mostly silly fun for the participants, it's
deathly serious for the captains, as the captain from the 1st place
team gets to feast on the liver of the captain of the 4th place
team. No, we're just kidding. However, we do give out some good prizes to all of the
captains.
A team's final score is the sum of the normalized scores of each of
the events. Each event has 100 points total, and these points are
distributed based on the score of each team. In most events, the
scoring is heavily weighted by participation, so the way to make your
team win is to get your team members to show up by constantly
pestering them by email and in person.
Past olympics can be found here.