Day two of SigmaWest.
Semilabs are moving forward, beyond the introductory material and getting serious. Today, we collected campers’ feedback about the semilabs, and the overwhelming majority said that the level of difficulty was right for them and they were very happy with the material.
As yesterday, we also had several lectures; today’s lectures were about investigating the alien minds of LLMs, reconstructing the evolutionary tree, and data privacy. Today, we also started the “Dinner with lecturers” program: campers who wanted to ask questions or just talk to the speakers could join the lecturers during the dinner and ask their questions there.
The Sigma tournament continued; today's topic was chemistry and biology. In addition to solving theoretical problems, it also included an experimental problem - teams were given 6 vials of chemicals; they were given the list of the chemicals, and their task was to determine which vial contained which one. And they only had 10 minutes to complete the task. Tensions were high, but they were able to identify most of the compounds.
And today, remarkably, we had some rain! Not too much, just several drops, but it was a welcome respite from the daily heat and a big surprise for our SoCal natives. Fortunately, it happened after our Sigma break - which, by the way, included ziplines, another popular activity with campers. We had a beautiful rainbow during this, and those doing outdoor activities had an amazing backdrop to their exercise. During both breaks, campers had the opportunity to play their chess matches for the chess tournament. We updated the standings, and those who won will continue their journey to victory tomorrow.
And we had a whole new set of evening workshops; probably the most exciting one was about making and testing your own boomerangs. But this was just one of 7 workshops - you could also solder your own electronic badge, learn to fold and cut paper to make complicated shapes, and learn how to divide by zero. The most unusual workshop was fully designed by AI (with some help from our staff) - but we won’t tell you what it included.
At the end of the day, campers and counselors discussed the day, and everyone was happy, tired, and excited for the next day. Come back tomorrow for Day 3!