Coding

Unicorns and things

Last Sunday, I attended another AI competition, this one was hosted at the Shopify lounge in Ottawa.

Firstly, wow, the Shopify lounge is big. It even has a slide between floors!

check out that slide on the left! Unpictured, an arcade machine!

Among the other impressive features, an arcade machine, full wall mural of a unicorn knight battle, and of course, a free espresso machine. It looked like a delightful place to work on a day to day basis.

Last weekend I attended the ‘CS Games’. The CS Games are a Canadian computer science competition that, this year, was hosted at ETS in Montreal. In this post, I will be looking at one of the challenges I participated in: The AI Challenge.

Being my first attempt at a CS games event, I had no idea what to expect. There were 3 people from our school team working on this challenge, and upon arrival, we were told that we would be writing an AI for a two team capture-the-flag snowball fight. There will be two teams, each AI controlled by a different university. Each team has seven players and the goal is to steal the flag in the middle of the course, and bring it back to the starting position, or to knock out all of the players on the other team. To prevent a rush for the flag, at least 20% of the players in the game must be knocked out before the flag can be picked up. Teams will fight a succession of games across a tournament bracket to see who is the best.

It seems appropriate that the first entry should be a simple introduction; A summary of where I am right now. As of the time of this writing I, Brandon Surmanski, am a 4th year Computer Engineering (CEG) student at the University of Ottawa, and I am a serial programmer.

The word serial in the context of computers usually refers to low-level networking stuff, or marshalling objects into a flat representation. I am not that kind of programmer. I am the kind that always has some side project on my mind and can’t stop myself from jamming at the keyboard until something runs. Sometimes it is nothing more than a prototype and I get bored and move onto the next project, and sometimes I end up with something cool. Either way, this blog is intended to log the progress of my meandering conscious. From the point of view of this blog, abandoning projects will result in new insight of whatever has caught my attention.