Today was the real day of the competition where Mack and I showcased our work and pit our wits (or in this case tanks) against others. The day actually started off pretty badly. We were the second last team to arrive (as usual) and was seated almost in the exact same spot as last year's competition, where we didn't do so well. To top it all off, many of us were having computer problems and weren't unable to start on the programming test until hours later. But things turned up brightly in the end! Apparently, we were the only team that stuck with our problem due to its difficulty. The other teams either dropped out or switched question so I'm sure we scored some brownie points on that field. Our demo went smoothly, and the presentation Mack and I worked on last night payed off. The only downside was that the judges gave us a much larger test data and our program wasn't able to solve it or at least not entirely. Our program solved the first problem in about 2.5 hrs while the second problem, was still running when we left the competition, which was almost 6 hrs later.
The second part of the competition involved a programming test where we control 3 tanks and try to capture the flag while fending off the opponent's 3 tanks. It was quite hard trying to navigate around objects but somehow we pulled everything together in the last hour. In short, I would say our tanks are pessimistic. When the opponent has the flag, our tanks would not shoot. When we have the flag, our non flag carrying tanks would go kill their tanks. It was actually quite funny watching the matches because we had some navigation issues where we would get stuck indefinitely and the only way we could free ourselves is if somebody killed us and our tanks restarted. So ironically, our tanks would do worse against non shooting tanks. Against the stock teams, we almost lost to "team dumb" while we clearly beaten "Team No Nonsense.". After the round robin against the stock teams, we played against other competitors. There was this one team we played against that wouldn't shoot at all and it was perhaps one of the longest matches. After 6-7 matches, a tie was still drawn and on the last, by some miracle our tanks pulled through. Definitely one of the longest matches in the entire tournament! In the end, we placed 2nd where the first team beaten us 6-2 after 3 rounds.
In any case, I must say I am looking forward to tomorrow's annoucement of the winners and the fact that it is also my birthday :D!