McMaster Science Olympics

Clayton · **Posted:** Thu Oct 18, 2007 9:54 pm

Just wondering if anyone else participated today? Perhaps we saw each other and didn't even notice. I personally took part in the Software Engineering challenge and managed an awesome score of negative infinity. Go us. Anyone else?

zylum · **Posted:** Fri Oct 19, 2007 9:40 am

Software engineering was so lame when I did it. Is it still the lego garbage? We ended up winning though Smile

Clayton · **Posted:** Fri Oct 19, 2007 3:00 pm

Yeah, it's still that lego crap.

CodeMonkey2000 · **Posted:** Fri Oct 19, 2007 3:07 pm

Where was this?

Clayton · **Posted:** Fri Oct 19, 2007 3:15 pm

McMaster University, in Hamilton Ontario.

CodeMonkey2000 · **Posted:** Fri Oct 19, 2007 3:21 pm

How much did it cost?

Clayton · **Posted:** Fri Oct 19, 2007 4:02 pm

$18. It got me a free t-shirt, lunch, and covered the fees for the actual events.

Hikaru79 · **Posted:** Fri Oct 19, 2007 5:01 pm

Clayton @ Thu Oct 18, 2007 10:54 pm wrote:

Just wondering if anyone else participated today? Perhaps we saw each other and didn't even notice. I personally took part in the Software Engineering challenge and managed an awesome score of negative infinity. Go us. Anyone else?

I never participated in this, so perhaps this is a naive question, but - how does one achieve such a remarkable result?

Clayton · **Posted:** Fri Oct 19, 2007 5:07 pm

Well, basically the whole idea was to come up with a way to control a program (written in C++) that simulates flying a plane. Basically, we had to land it with a straight and level portion, approach portion, and landing portion. The closer you were to the optimal path, the more points one got. It just so happened that we (my school) did not have a Lego Mindstorms kit to practise with, so we learned everything we know in 15 minutes at the competition, leaving us approximately 15 minutes to actually code the damn thing. Anyways, we started off fine and had ~50000 points, then... we ended up doing loops over and over again, and they terminated the program after we had reached ~ -1500000 points. Fun stuff.

Delos · **Posted:** Tue Oct 23, 2007 8:42 pm

Clayton, did you drop by the Psych Building at all? I was out there for a bit, in between classes and thesis work.

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