HN has a post character limit it seems. So that's why. I don't want to waste time making this beautiful. HN is already ugly or I'd better say naked. Anyways sorry.
Imagine you're this Iranian guy, you're just studying in the "shining talents" school. Then your straight-A friend tells you that there is this cool Olympiad about AI, being held for the first time in Iran. They are good at math and algorithms and stuff like that, but they don't have the confidence to study for the informatics Olympiad and think everyone there is a genius. They think AI Olympiad is more competition-free and easier. Actually, you're also bad at informatics and discrete math and everything related to computer science (and you want to get accepted in the best university of the country, in computer science!). So you both participate, with you signing up as late as you can, not being sure.
At first, it seems like an easier version of informatics Olympiad, but then you find out that you need to learn statistics, probability and calculus and continuous stuff like that, so it's different. You feel good because your are better in calculus than combinatorics (still horrible grades, but better). So you study.
Today is the day. You brought a pen, because you are used to school exams and final exams, not Olympiads. Someone you know lends you a pencil. You give the exam, and it looks like some sort of IQ test than AI or even statistics. You finally see some statistics and you solve those, also seeing the Monty Hall problem that you just know the name of because your nerd friend tried to explain it to you, before the Olympiad existed and you only shook your head so he doesn't have to stay and explain again just because you're bad. And you feel you did very very bad at the test. You guess you got 50% correct with your friend saying they got 70%.
Later on you hear from your friend and different sources that the floor would be around 30%-40% so you feel better. Then you get accepted! You didn't study much for the first exam, yet you got accepted. So unlike past you start studying consistently. Not a lot in volume, just consistently, 2-3 hours a day and you start liking it so you make it 4-5 hours, also studying for school.
You read the one hundred page ML book, and it's hard. You watch the Andrew NG course, and you find out it's so easy. You play it with 2x speed while also skipping with the arrow keys and you understand. You try to understand and memorize everything, even unimportant stuff like names of different things and concepts.
You have been studying for some time, and you are in this telegram channel that your smart friend introduced to you. It's selling some course now that the first exam ended. You hate courses. You also saw some course from a known organization. You didn't actually see, you saw the cover and that it costs 10 million tomans which was approximately 107.5 dollars at the time and now is 55 dollars (because the toman value decreased, not that the price decreased). But back to the unknown random telegram channel, their course costs 2 million tomans, 21.5 dollars in that time. You remember the idiom "There is no expensiveness without wisdom, no cheapness without reason." and don't want to buy the course.
You were talking to their sales support, and when you say no, they tell you you can pay 500 thousand instead if you have financial problems and you can participate in two sessions and then decide. If they only told you the "500 thousand" part, you'd be more suspicious but the second part is a good, harmless deal. At end the only thing you were worried about was that the courses don't have the needed quality. By the way, one session has already passed. The support also gives you a telegram ID, which is ID of the owner. They also talk with you and say some good things and convince you. You also know that they are from Ilam, and their goal is to make the Olympiad competition fair for everyone, not just the people who live in capital and study in the best country of the capital and the country. So you participate, not paying yet.
You go to the class, it's boring it's slow. There is no 2x and there is no skipping. That's why you hate courses. But some stuff click. Not entirely, but enough so you can later on search and chat with ChatGPT and use phind and perplexity and whatever to understand it deeper. It is indeed worth it, and you are surprised how cheap it is. 25 2-3 hour sessions (if teacher doesn't want to go overtime, which they sometimes do), with exams and homework and etc. So only considering the sessions, it's 86 cents per session, price of two ice creams (later on there is like 2-3 extra sessions and they find some test samples and questions for you to solve). You know the teacher isn't here for money. It's good, it's worth it. And it makes you remember to practice and study during the new year holidays (noruz). Also the classes get recorded and uploaded so you can rewatch them. By the pigeonhole principle, the idiom was too compressed to be always true in life.
You ditch the books for now, they are hard; Specially "Dive Into Deep Learning". You worship the Chinese and other smart Asian people and you see a lot of Chinese people made that book and it's hard so now you have more backbone than Youtube and Steven He channel to believe that Asians are smart (except you, being better than average).
Your Andrew NG videos end, so you need to read the books. You read them, not trying to understand everything, because you tried and it felt like too much. and the code, not because you're bad at coding, because the next exam is still theoretical and you know even if you are good at coding, you might fail here before writing a single line of code. The books start to become easier after you have watched the east-to-understand Andrew NG videos. Specially "One Hundred Page ML". You somehow end the books, with the intention of feeling better and safer because you read everything needed, not just really improving your chances.
You go to see the other resources, which are not necessary. You see most of them are practical and about coding, expect for the Sharifi Zarchi course which is the only Persian course, but you didn't have problems with English, happily. It's hard and complex, almost as hard as d2l. It's literally a recorded university course. But if you ignore the very advanced, complex parts, you can learn some good stuff, hard enough to not be explained deeply in the Andrew NG course, easy enough so you can understand. then you search what their last name means and it means barberry seller. Also they are the head of IOAI scientific committee. They also got a cool accent.
Now you feel you tried your best to achieve something, for the first time in your life. Like your father always says "Even if you fail, you know that you tried your best". Tomorrow is the exam day, and you should go the the capital of province. You stay at the house of one of your relatives. You don't study that day. You know that one day of study isn't gonna if you're accepted or not.
Your smart nerd friend doesn't participate in the second exam even though they were accepted the first. The school employee tells them to at least think of it as "shooting an arrow in the dark" so it might hit the target. They are already great in studying and this Olympiad doesn't have any, any kind of benefits in Konkur (university exam). Also the 4th rank of some year's Konkur talked to us, and when my friend asked about this, they said "There is an unwritten rule that, Olympiad is for Tehranians (capital people)". So it's logical for them to not practice and participate, even if they liked to. But me at the other hand, I'm kinda looking to run away from konkur, and I don't have a very very great reputation that's gonna be ruined by practicing for Olympiad. If I don't study for Olympiad, I'll waste my time with gaming too much or things like that anyway.
It's the exam day. You remember some stuff that you were afraid to learn and fully understand, not to just read. Because they were hard and you tried and failed. So you read them fast, you still don't understand. It's time to go. You get there and you give the exam in some cold, school gym. The questions aren't like what you expected. Your anxiety rises.
You thought you're supposed to memorize the formulas like the sigmoid function, the normal distribution etc. And you feel solving the stuff doesn't really need knowing the AI and having red the books, just knowing high-school math and being creative. But it's all written. It looks like a IQ test again and you feel bad. Then you find some questions that you think need reading the books, and you feel better, even though they aren't a lot. You see a question about clustering. You are angry, it wasn't in any of resources. You red them inch by inch. You know it's unsupervised just because you accidentally watched a bit of Andrew NG unsupervised course instead of Deep Learning, and then saying to yourself "Thanks god I found out, or else I would be watching something useless that doesn't come to the test.". Very later on you find about it's about the elbow method. You had to draw the graph etc etc. (#todo, talk about the answer sheet being hard to understand)
The 5 hour exam ends. Your bottom feels cold and aches a bit. You talk with your cousin. They seem to gave as good as you, even though you were only studying for AI Olympia, but they were practicing for informatics Olympiad and for the AI Olympiad just studied all day for a whole week. They wrote their answers on the package of the cakes they gave you during the exam so they can check with the answer, which is smart. Then you get on the car and your uncle drives you to hometown, along your dad cheering you up.
The support asks you politely to check your answers, you've just came to home. You're tired and you tell them that. Today, and tomorrow, and after tomorrow. They say they are worried you forget your answers. So you go and check. How can you forget... You remember precisely your answers to all multiple choice questions. Or maybe your mind is playing tricks on you. So you get 46%. You studied more this time, still getting 4% worse. Of course you know that those aren't the same exam, and in the same level but still... also you remember your cousin got 44%. The support says it seems good. You feel a bit better, not very much. Also the people in class got similar results, 45%, 42%. Someone got 23%. The owner talks to you saying that this exam wasn't very good, as everyone got similar results. You fell better. Even better when you find out that 9 out of 10 people in your class got accepted in the second exam, including you. Also your cousin got accepted. And first person telling you this is some random classmate, which you have no idea why would people go and look for your name in the results pdf published in late night of yesterday.
To be continued.