Woke up to my alarm at 9:30, was roused out of a very deep sleep. Decided to get some more sleep. Bad idea! I should have realized, happened to me the last time I arrived in Europe from the US. I woke up at 3:30. Irritated at myself, I showered and headed to Migros to buy groceries. By the time I was back and eating a bowl of apple oatmeal, my irritation had disappeared and I was fresh and wakeful. Good thing, too! I went to look at the latest game theory homework and found that it was due this evening (somehow I’d mixed up the deadline with the Randomized Algorithms one.)
I went ham, got stuck on the first problem for like an hour, solved the second problem in 60 seconds, solved the 3rd problem with a little bit of difficulty. Typed the second and third problems up and circled back to the first. This was war! I attacked on all fronts, cracked the middle part of the problem and with no avail tried to leverage it into a solution for the last part (which would prove the first part). Thought I was getting somewhere and allowed myself a break for dinner. Dinner was really fun, made myself a tasty scramble, hung out with Ruth and Tom, Betty made everyone hot chocolate, people were decorating a Christmas tree.
45 minutes later I was back at it and my proposed approach was proving to be worthless. Desperate, I turned to the lecture notes for inspiration, and found a game with exactly the same properties as the game I was tussling with. Scratched my head, explored the parallels a bit–in no time I had a reduction that showed that I could use my game to simulate that game. Which meant my game couldn’t have a certain property that that game was known not to have…
The reduction took an hour and a half to type, in full generality. I drew a picture to illustrate and pasted it into my LaTeX. I had no time to check over my solution before sending it in, but spent another half an hour after the deadline checking for little errors and sent in a revised version which the nocturnal TA immediately accepted. Done! Now I just have to figure out how to fall asleep.