Hello, everyone!
UIUC is sponsoring the 2008 Projections/Reflections (http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/conference/2008/) conference from October 3 - 5. Don't miss this opportunity to see the great speakers and to participate in the career fair. The career fair has several big name (and not so big name) companies: Google, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, etc.
I'm going to be at the Morgan Stanley booth with a couple colleagues, accepting resumes and possibly getting you some on-site, initial interviews. You should come out, toss me your resume, and talk about how awesome you are.
Also, Morgan Stanley has a couple employees (Jeff Evans and me) competing in the corporate bracket of MechMania. A couple years ago, our company completely stomped the other companies and students. So, come out and get stomped or bring your boots and do your best to stomp us! Make sure you bring your A* game!
We look forward to seeing all of you out there.
*bump*
Who thinks they're going to this?
Myself, Nathan Dauber, and Jason Davis will be competing in MechMania and look forward to seeing you during the career fair.
Scott
Just left the first meeting, the server isn't done, they have no documentation for us, and they can't give us lots of details on how the game works.
I was not very nice.
So disappointed we'll see if they pull this off.
Scott
I just wanted to comment on the career fair. It was awesome to get to talk to some of the bigger companies like Intel, VMware, Bloomberg, Volition Inc, and Facebook. It's good to get that kind of experience talking to employers. I think it is also great for our school if we have more and more people approach employers and say that they are from SIUE. We have a great Computer Science program and we need to let employers know about us! There were a lot of people there wanting students that had experience with C++. This gives us a great advantage because UIUC teaches Java as their main language. So if you didn't get the chance to go this year, look out for the date around this time next year and look for people who are car pooling there. The drive isn't that bad and we had a lot of fun on the way there and back.
QuoteJust left the first meeting, the server isn't done, they have no documentation for us, and they can't give us lots of details on how the game works.
Yeah, that's how things were for us when we competed. The actual competition (for which an auditorium was dedicated) was delayed for
hours as they literally debugged code--live and in front of us--and tried to get their server running. We just sat there--dead tired--and waited... (then drove back to Edwardsville on no sleep... :o)
It's unfortunately what I've come to expect. Hopefully, they'll get their act together someday.
Good luck! :-)
We recieved game info and somewhat of an API at 1:30 AM last night......
Well apparently we can start coding now....we were supposed to have a demo at 8 code at 9....their visualizer isn't done yet and there is no demo to be had, SOOOOO they decided to allow us to start coding AND NOT TELL US!!!
I think an official letter of complaint may come out of this.
Back to kicking a$$ and taking names.
Update:
we just found out that you can fly through ANYTHING....so the 8 hours we spent perfecting our gameboard class and our very intricate and complicated A* were wasted.....today has been nothing but changing rules and changing specifications....Did i mention they STILL don't have a server working properly to host this, or the visualization to watch it.
</rant>
Scott
Quote from: raptor on 2008-10-04T19:37:18-05:00 (Saturday)
Update:
we just found out that you can fly through ANYTHING....so the 8 hours we spent perfecting our gameboard class and our very intricate and complicated A* were wasted.....today has been nothing but changing rules and changing specifications....Did i mention they STILL don't have a server working properly to host this, or the visualization to watch it.
</rant>
Scott
Yes, all that effort on A* was for naught. We have "teleportation" (aka a quantum sneak).
We got back after a few hours of sleep to find out they moved up the due date. How nice. This competition was a complete and total cluster #$@*. I think I speak for my entire team when I say we are hugely disappointed. I plan on writing some letters.
Scott
So, did anyone do anything kewl/good?
Well, after I did A* for our team, we were informed that we can just teleport through objects; so, no need for path planning beyond some basic straight-line trig. However, my teammate couldn't write a subsumption engine for the life of him while I was doing A*, and so I rewrote the engine while debugging UIUC's client code. We were supposed to have subversion so my teammate and I could integrate continuously throughout the competition, but they didn't give it to us for several hours. We tried setting up our own earlier than that, but UIUC's firewall prevented it from working.
In the end, we had a ship that could avoid objects if it had been necessary and could wander around. A few more hours, and we probably could've done something awesome, like our planned Monte Carlo simulation for mid-term strategy and subsumption engine for tactics, but we went to bed after 18 hours of coding. Next year, I'll take a better teammate and make sure we can integrate our code before the coordinators decide it's more important to put up the twitter feed rather than give us what we need to work.
Regardless of all this, however, I still had fun. Yeah, the coordinators sucked, and their code was even worse, but what the heck. Oh well, you can't do well every year I guess.