September 12, the competition began as scheduled!
The day before the competition, Lu Zhou and the others took the school bus from the new campus back to the old campus and moved into the temporary dormitories arranged by the university.
The mattresses and pillows had all been prepared. They only needed to bring sheets and covers. Those who were not particular could even just show up empty-handed. After all, although the competition lasted seventy-two hours, the average amount of sleep each person got might not even add up to ten hours.
Lu Zhou was one of them.
He had the heaviest workload and the most to finish. He would only have time for a short nap the next day, so he did not even bring a change of clothes and went empty-handed. The first thing he did upon arriving at the new dorm was lie down and sleep.
Even if he could not fall asleep, he had to force himself to.
He woke up at five the next morning, lay in bed with his eyes closed until seven, then went to the cafeteria for breakfast. After that, Lu Zhou met up with Wang Xiaodong and Lin Yuxiang, and the three headed to the dedicated computer lab the school had prepared for the Mathematical Modeling Competition.
According to the official registration information, this competition had participants from 1,338 universities across 33 provinces, cities, and autonomous regions nationwide, including Hong Kong and Macao, as well as the United States and Singapore. A total of 25,347 teams and more than 70,000 university students would access the competition website simultaneously, download the problems, and take part.
The competition was jointly organized by the Department of Higher Education of the Ministry of Education and the Hua Nation Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. Thanks to