Extreme Xtreme Programming

One of my engineering friends, Manu, asked if I would like to join him in a programming competition about a month ago, and at the time I didn’t really know what the whole thing was about. He said that we would receive a free T-shirt if we participated so that was enough for me to say yes. This weekend the competition took place and was held at Uni. The Xtreme Programming Competition is an annual event organised by IEEE and nearly 1000 teams competed from universities around the world this year. The competition runs for 24 hours straight with teams comprising of up to three people. We had to write programs that solved problems that were released to us throughout the day and all the teams around the world competed simultaneously. Because it started at 12am in London, we started the competition in Auckland at the equivalent time 13 hours ahead at1pm. The other guy in our team was called Buddy, who I had met previously but didn’t really know too well.

Team Octave at IEEE Xtreme

Hours before the competition, Manu texted us to let us know that he wouldn’t be able to join us as he had to work. Buddy and I thought we’d still give it a go anyway, even though I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t know enough programming to do well in the competition. Our team was called OCTAVE and we had an allocated space with computers we could use. At 1pm when the competition started, we had a look at the first few questions that were available and I decided I would attempt to solve a problem requiring me to create a median filter for photos. Basically what I had to do was remove noise from a greyscale image by evaluating adjacent pixels of the noise and replacing the pixel with the median luminance of the adjacent pixels. Hmm I think I made it sound more confusing that it actually was. It did take over an hour to work out how to write the program correctly and take into account all the exceptions, but I was very pleased when I submitted my program and it was accepted! A few hours into the competition we had completed 3 out of the 4 available questions at the time, and we were ranked in the top 100 teams (out of 971).

At dinner time I met up with Ming, who was also competing in another team. We had pizza for dinner and it helped to re-energise us all before getting back into the programming. After midnight we got a text from Manu, who said he could join us since he finished work. Shortly after that he arrived and we were finally a full team. We answered a few more problems and stayed within the top 150 teams or so, though in the early hours of the morning fatigue was starting to win the battle. Manu and Buddy decided to have a power nap on the floor while I tried to press on with another problem, but I didn’t last long because before I knew it, I was starting to doze off at the computer table as well. We ordered McDonald’s breakfast and it arrived at around 6am.

The 24 hour competition was a bit too much for some people

I think the competition forced me to learn new skills and ways of doing things. It was a good experience and I’m looking forward to competing next year as well. If that wasn’t bad enough, I then had to work for 4 hours after the competition ended. I’m just relieved I didn’t collapse while I was serving customers!