Gabriel Goh Hao Xiang

Author: Gabriel Goh

  • Apply local

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    Gabriel Goh
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    Just a short PSA to males serving NS thinking about applying to overseas universities: There is a common misconception that you cannot accept a NUS offer and apply to other (overseas) schools at the same time. This is probably because this is true (in most cases) for offers to overseas colleges. At least for my…

  • IMO 2025

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    Gabriel Goh
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    “Live-solve” / Solution walk-through Have not been spoiled on the problems, but I have been spoiled on the scores, so I can roughly guess the difficulty of this paper. Day 1 (0h5m) First thoughts: CGN and the geom looks weird. Actually the FE looks weird also. Not much else to think about (0h10m) I tried…

  • 2025 Senior Q2

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    Gabriel Goh
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    Q2 of this year’s S(ingapore)MO Senior Round 2 was my proposal (so is Q3 but that one isn’t very interesting), and I just wanted to share a little about the problem development process. Anyways. One day I was looking at a geom solution that involves radius zero circles, and I thought it would be fun…

  • Ranking ISL problems by popularity

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    Gabriel Goh
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    What is the most popular ISL problem in the last decade? People like to discuss about which is the best problem in a contest, specifically from the IMO shortlist (ISL), but that usually ends up in an argument about what even makes a problem “better” – there are so many factors to consider and everyone…

  • Paris 2024 Medal Tallies

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    Gabriel Goh
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    Americans use Fahrenheit to measure temperature. Americans use miles to measure distance. Apparently, Americans use a unique olympics medal tally as well. While basically every country ranks nations first by their gold medal count, and tiebreak by silvers (then bronzes), many US news outlets like to sort by total number of medals won. For those…

  • IMO 2024 Day 2

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    Gabriel Goh
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    Was tough doing this in camp, but I’m finally done. It’s rare to see someone’s thought process for an entire paper, so here’s mine – hopefully it’s sufficiently entertaining. Needless to say, spoilers below. Here we go again! (0h0m) First thoughts: Ok GCA. Is that an FE?! What kind of word is aquaesulian? Why is…

  • IMO 2024 Day 1

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    Gabriel Goh
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    A lot of spoilers below. Stuck in camp, doing the entire paper on my Learnet. Here are the ramblings of a guy with insufficient sleep (may contain mistakes): (0h0m) First thoughts: Q1 looks very standard, like a mix between a junior olympiad question and a classical problem. Q2 also looks pretty standard, although the "for…

  • Dating Singapore maps

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    Gabriel Goh
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    Map dating is a very well known activity, and there are tons of resources to help you do it. However, most of the time the map/globe in question covers the whole world. What about a map of Singapore? I took this picture at a café in Johor Bahru, and there was no date on it.…

  • The Story of SEIF

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    Gabriel Goh
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    (And how I accidentally “proposed” an IMO5) It’s been almost two and a half years since, and yet if you asked me for my most unique and memorable experience, there is a good chance I would still mention this story. It takes more than a healthy dose of idealism for 16-year-old me to wake up…

  • Murphy’s law, NS edition

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    Gabriel Goh
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    This list will be periodically updated, suggestions are welcome. Small 2LT update: Original:

  • A* for life

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    Gabriel Goh
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    (Random 2am thoughts which I attempted to write out coherently) Let’s talk about pathfinding. Suppose you start at point A and want to reach point B. There are a bunch of other points and you can move from point to point through edges, and these edges have non-negative weights. One way to do it is…

  • “This probably works”

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    Gabriel Goh
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    Advice(?) mainly for consistent Q2/5 solvers. The way I viewed Math Olympiad and contest problems changed a lot from 2022 to 2023. I think this change of strategy really worked for me, so I want to pen it down before I forget. Imagine yourself with 2 progress bars, one for knowledge and one for intuition.…

  • Designing digital camouflage

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    Gabriel Goh
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    I’ve just finished three weeks of confinement in National Service, and I don’t really want to talk about that so. It took me around a week to realise that every single uniform (and bag, and helmet) has a different camouflage design. Uniforms are not uniform. And that perplexed me a lot, because if they were…