In Memory Of My First Award In University

Recently, I always have a headache because of writing papers. To relax, I clicked on some blogs I had posted before. Inadvertently, I realized that it seems that I haven’t written a blog about my first experience of winning an award in a mathematical modeling contest. So I specially reorganized my contest experience and feelings at that time for everyone’s reference.

Preparation

well, none of preparation has been made (ó﹏ò｡). I formed a team with two roommates two months before the start of the contest. However, when there were only two days left before the start of the contest, they told me that they knew nothing about mathematical modeling. They weren’t even very good at basic coding. For me, this means that I have to undertake almost all the work by myself.

Further worse

Once the contest started, one of my teammates told me he had another job to do. As a tutor, he has to go and give lessons to high school students, which meant only two people in this team including me had spare time to finish this contest.

Sea Lamprey

I chose the problem of modeling the sex ratio of sea lampreys. This is very interesting. The sex of sea lampreys changes with the environment. In a harsh environment with insufficient food supply, more harmful factors, and a low growth rate, lampreys tend to reduce the female ratio to reduce the number of reproductions and avoid excessive offspring competing for survival in an environment with limited resources. At the same time, by increasing the male ratio, ensuring that higher-quality males have the opportunity to reproduce, thereby improving the reproduction quality and enhancing the survival ability of offspring. I chose to use the Lotka-Volterra predator-prey model to simulate the relationship between sea lampreys and their natural enemies. At the same time, I used an agent based model to simulate each individual. In order to obtain the long-term change data of their sex ratio, I used SVM to fit the relationship curve between their sex ratio and time. Finally, I also obtained a result that is relatively in line with the preset. Along the way, my other teammate was also reading relevant papers and gave me a little advice, so that I could also concentrate on writing all the code and modeling correctly.

Writing Paper

Finally, one day before the end, I completed all the modeling and data processing. The next task is to write the paper. Fortunately, my tutor friend was also free to participate in the writing task on that day. I also gave them some parts that don’t need problem-solving ideas to write (such as restating the problem). I alone completed the part of model establishment and solution in the paper. Finally, we wrote until six in the morning before finally submitting the paper to the organizing committee’s mailbox.

Result

The contest was in February 2024, and the results didn’t come out until May 2024. When I was on the subway to Xuhui District, Shanghai, I received the final contest result—-Meritorious Winner, which means we got a ranking in the top 6.6%. I was so happy that I jumped up, so much so that the passengers next to me came over and asked me what had happened.