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Imagine Cup 2005 - "Imagine a world where technology dissolves the boundaries between us.."

Imagine Cup being one of the major global competitions for students hosted by Microsoft definitely draws the attention of anyone interest in computers, software, graphics and game programming.

I learnt about IC an year or more back that was when the IC 2003 was on. I hadnt worked on .NET at that time and I always thought that it is only for the geeks out there. "Change" is what is driving everything today. I saw the IC 2005 video when Mr.Tyson Dowd visited Bangalore and he spoke about IC '05. I still hadnt made-up my mind whether or not I should participate. Finally when the Round 1 dates for India was nearing, I teamed-up with Sabarish, Sharath and Deepthi Rao and we decided to get into it.

Round 1 is about a chess program, wherein we are given an SDK and we are supposed to code for a function to find the checkmate move. It is definitely a good task to do but I felt that we are wasting time when we think of what participants in other countries would be doing. They would be working on their Software that would be submitted for the finals. We are stiil writing some crappy code for a chekmate. Phew...

After lots of discussion amongst ourselves we decided to start off with a brute-force method to get cracking with the program. After facing a hell lot of problems with MovePiceUnconditionally, we chaged our approach and now our program seems to be working fine except that it needs more tuning for performance. I read in the spoke "...so that you can save some precious nano seconds..." Oh. Please I wasnt thinking in nano seconds to compute the Checkmate in 1 move. The SDK is undoubtedly crappy in terms of ease-of-use, clarity and in some cases even the functionality.

Inspite of the fact that my exams are going on, I am not able to resist from "Spoking" (as in visitng theSpoke and Poke to see whats up). I also decided to make a program that will test the code that we write for different TestCases. After having some problems with loading different XML files (which contain the position of the different pieces) I finally have a working verion of the tester, which all of us will be using. It would also help our team to test for different cases and easily store & forward the results of the test.

One of the test cases:

<ChessGame>
<White>
<King HasMoved="True" Position="b7" />
<Knight HasMoved="True" Position="e7" />
<Knight HasMoved="True" Position="f6" />
</White>
<Black>
<King HasMoved="False" Position="d8" />
</Black>
</ChessGame>

theSpoke was hot with lots of discussions about whether or not people should 'openly' post the strategies that they are using in their solution and also some of them wanted to even post their DLLs!! Sriram said it right... Why dont they post the code itself if they want to really help someone?...

Lots happening for IC... India stands at No.2 in the number of registrations for IC too!
Yo!