Thursday, October 25, 2007

Herbert Round 1 Started

Today at GMT 00:00, Imagine Cup 2008 Algorithm competition has started its 1st round. The algorithm competition is about programming a bot, named Herbert to traverse through all the white buttons in a 24 x 24 board. Each point of the board is one of the following :
  1. white button that needs to be pressed
  2. grey button which resets all the white buttons to unpressed state
  3. ordinary point
  4. wall through which Herbert cannot move
The coding is done in a simple language called "h". Interestingly "h" does not support any decision making statements and looping is indirectly supported through recursion. The coding for a particular level must be done using at most the number of bytes specified for that level. Ability to do so results in being awarded a full marks. If one completes the level with lower number of bytes, he is rewarded with a score beyond full marks. The competition has started from today. Round 1 consists of 4 matches, from which a total of 200 advance to Round 2 which will be a take home coding challenge. If you are interested, check it out at the Algorithms section of Imagine Cup 2008 site. However, Imagine Cup being a Microsoft financed competition requires the participants to work on Windows platform and have .NET 1.1 runtime installed on their computers. I had a rank of 75 in the warm-up round and I am trying my best for getting into round 2.

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