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May 06, 2005
York Science and Engineering Olympics
You know Science Fairs? Well I’ve been to York… and was involved in two events: Robocoding and Fermi Questions. We wasted half a day sitting and 30 minutes competing, but I guess I skipped school… so it was a fun waste of time (this time).
For Robocode, Ivan and I had made two robots, which we named after ourselves. During qualifiers, our robots achieved an early lead: alternating 1st and 2nd; however at round 7, their system crashed and all but two robots were paralized and could not move/rotate/shoot (essentially were stationary targets). The two robots quickly took advantage of this, and got extraordinary points by shooting down the dummies. When the York people had realized that their program crashed, they stopped the simulation and awarded the victory to one of the abusers, and thus, we did not qualify. What a disappointment: our robots were just so well made!
As for Fermi Questions, we pretty much dominated. We finished a few minutes ahead of time, only to find out that we have made a slight mistake in one of our calculations. Of course, we fixed it (and finished the contest again). In the last few minutes, I remember myself being bored; I was dancing on desks and flicking the lights on and off. The door had a window, so the graders outside thought that I was out of my mind… and that we would never win, but guess what? We won (and got our 1st place golden T-Shirts).
Posted by Oleg Ivrii at May 6, 2005 05:47 PM