The final day is off to a slow start with the algorithm finals starting at 10am. Meanwhile, there'll be two corporate forums by On Paint Technology and AOL with the first one already in progress.
Finally, after three days of fierce competition, we will find out who the winners are!
The Component Development Competition eventually came to an end at 5pm bringing a close to all of the competitions except for the Algorithm Finals which holds later today.
There were a couple of insightful presentations by Eli Lilly and VeriSign, and there were the Crowd Sourcing round table and the TopCoder developer forums which were also pretty interesting. Particularly, I was impressed with the scope of what VeriSign is actually involved in.
The Eli Lilly Burnout Revenge competition also held and it was pretty cool.
With just today to go, all I can say is that it's been a really fun and great experience.
We're off to a start with the second part of the Studio Design competition and the Component Development competition. The Studio Design finalists have about 4 and a half hours to finish up with their designs, while the developers have about 8 and a half hours to get their implementations up and running - including the test cases.
The Room 3 Algorithm Competition ended with SkidanovAlex, lewha0, marek.cygan and bmerry taking the first, second, third and fourth positions respectively.
Just before the wildcard round (where four runner-ups after the third position from each room compete against each other with the winner advancing to the final), the following finalists were through to the finals: Burunduk1, ACRush, John Dethridge, Petr, Eryx, vlad89, andrewzta, ardiankp and Yarin advance to the finals.
I left the Mirage soon after the wildcard round started because I was rather exhausted and had to get some sleep. tomek emerged as the winner of the wildcard round and also advanced to the finals.
The algorithm competition finals will be taking place on the final day, Thursday, the 15th. Meanwhile, the second round of Studio Design and the component development competition will be taking on day 3.
In other news, Eli Lilly will be organising a Burnout Revenge competition today which involves orchestrating the greatest car crash ever, or something along those lines. I tried my hands on the game and it was pretty cool. It's going to be fun. They're giving away and iPod Touch, an iPod and an iPod nano (I didn't really catch this) to contestants who come in first, second and third places respectively. I'm not sure what the judging criteria is but I'll try to find out.
A couple of hours after the completion of the algorithm competition for the second room, the finalists off the third and final room were introduced, as usual, prior to the commencement of the competition.
Room 2 winners announced
Additionally, photos for Day 2 can be viewed here.
There was an AOL Presentation right after the algorithm competition advancers were announced. They talked about Truveo, which is, put in simple terms, a robust platform for searching videos. Truveo basically crawls the web for videos and stores all sorts of useful data during indexing which simplifies the search process and makes it easier to find videos that you are looking for. AOL are also providing an open API that can be used with the Truveo platform. The Truveo Developer Challenge was also officially announced which involves developing a useful widget using the Truveo API. Sounds interesting.
Meanwhile, the second set of finalists for the Algorithm Competition Semi-finals were introduced. The Coding Phase is still in progress and it appears every one of the finalists has been able to finish up with the 250-point problem so far.
We're off to a start with the first room of the alogrithm competition semi-final. The competitors were divided into three batches, referred to as "rooms".
After the Coding Phase was completed, ACRush came in first place with 1360.54 points, with Jan_Kuipers coming in second with 1025.63 and a distant third by Burunduk2 with 692.68 points. Fourth, fifth and sixth places were occupied by malcin, Burunduk1 and Klinck with 620.99, 620.26 and 610.21 points respectively.
After the Challenge Phase, ACRush still maintained first position with 1410.56 points with Burunduk1 second and malcin third with 1204.43 and 620.99 points respectively.
The advancing finalists were announced after the System Testing Phase was completed with Burunduk1 taking ifrst place and ACRush and John Dethridge as runners-up.
The Welcome Reception was pretty nice, which took place about an hour after the with some speeches by TopCoder staff, people went around getting to know each other and there was plenty of good food to go round. I was pretty exhausted so I couldn't write an update at that time.
The sponsors (AOL, betfair, NSA, BT, Verisign, Eli Lilly) were all set up and apparently, they're competing for more attention from coders. Every one of them have gaming systems with large screen displays setup, except for the NSA. Small wonder no one really likes them. Okay, just kidding.
Looking forward to the algorithm semifinals tomorrow. It's going to be fun. We're just getting warmed up! Additionally, AOL is organising a scavenger hunt for a chance to win an iPod Touch. Looks like AOL is in the lead for grabbing everyone's attention so far.
I put something together to help out with knowing what games are available.
AOL System: XBox 360 Games: Guitar Hero III (although I've only watched it being played, this game is awesome), FIFA 08
betfair System: Nintendo Wii Games: Mario Kart Wii, Wii Sports
BT System: Nintendo Wii Game: Mario Kart Wii
Eli Lilly System: XBox 360 Game: Burnout (I'm not sure of which version)
Verisign System: Nintendo Wii Game: Mario Kart Wii
Meanwhile, some more gaming at the event
And did I mention that Guitar Hero rocks?
Chances are there'd probably be a six-way Mario Kart showdown. I'd like to see that happen.
With the Marathon Match over and the Component Design competition coming to a close in a few minutes, we are getting close to the end of the first day.
Meanwhile, every one of the sponsors seems to have set up a gaming system, so there's apparently lots of fun to go round.
The day's been great so far.
I'm currently working on a way of integrating appropriate photos from the photo album with each individual post. I will be looking into the Picasa Web Album API which I just came across.
The Component Design Competition has just started. Meanwhile, the Marathon Match competitors have just taken a break for lunch. Met argolite, who has consistently been the top designer for quite a long while now.
I also uploaded some videos to Youtube, but the video compression is awful so I will upload them elsewhere and update this post as soon as I do so.
