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, 2007 is the fourth
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.