Having IC 2008 just ended, registration is open for IC 2009 at the official site.

Check out the categories for next year, and start preparing for Egypt!

The theme is kind of open (Solve the World's Toughest Problems), you can focus your efforts in whatever you see fit, not restricted to one social problem like previous years. This may seem like an advantage, but I anticipate a lot of great ideas from all over the world to compete against...

Good luck!

A lot has changed since 2004 when Imagine Cup was barely known here in Argentina and Pablo De Grande and myself went to Brazil for the finals in the Software Design category.

Now we have presence in 3 categories

Software Design

Team: Useless

• Sebastian Miserendino
• Augusto Chesini
• Ivana Tilca

Project Hoshimi

Team: ChemicalBrothers

• Cristian Pereyra
• Carlos Miguens 

Algorithm

• Pablo Gauna (Last year's Project Hoshimi winner)

Congratulations to all and good luck in the finals!

Finalists have been announced!

Finalists

Congratulations Chemical Brothers!

Ahora hay que mantener la copa en el país, a ponerle garra.

Especiales felicitaciones a Cristian Pereyra, integrante de dicho equipo.

Te tenía fé desde que te conocí en Gaming! =)
Cualquier cosa que necesites decime con confianza

The top 10 teams for the Project Hoshimi category in imagine cup have been announced, and no less than 20% of the teams are from Argentina! =)

I'm very proud of these two teams, especially Chemical Brothers because they were introduced to this game by me in Gaming.NET (our country's own project hoshimi competition), and they travelled to San Luis for our national finals.

The top 6 finalist will be announced tomorrow, and those 6 teams will travel to Paris with all expenses paid to participate for the grand prize of U$S 8000; and hopefully they will have better luck than me (I was in the top 10 two years ago, and was beaten right in this stage, so I was one of the 4 teams that were left out of the finals, talk about the worst position to lose!)

All the luck to you!

Here in Argentina we have a local hoshimi competition, it's kinda like the imagine cup, only a little easier (it's for highschool students) and with a little less time for the finals (this year we gave tehm 4.5 hours to make the necessary modifications to their code)

Don't know what I'm talking about? Hoshimi is a game where you have to program the Artificial Intelligence of some bots to accomplish objectives, score points, and win.

Imagine cup is an international competition where you have hoshimi, and a prize of U$S 8.000 in the finals.

What we did here is called Gaming.NET, it's the same, only a little easier, and the first prize is an x-box 360... pretty cool, right?

This year the finals were held in San Luis, Argentina, and we had 20 teams (10 from San Luis and 10 from the Capital), and I was in charge of the SDK modifications, which included 2 new objectives, and one twist to an existing one.

NumberOfBotsObjective: You are only allowed to have N bots alive between two turns (X and Y). If you do, you get a bonus.

OverallNumberOfBotsObjective: You are only allowed to have N bots alive in the entire match, if you exceed this number, you cannot get the bonus

Negative Bonus for NavigationObjectives: The name says it all, there are several navigation objectives (with only one navpoint each) that give you negative points! Some are scattered around the map, some are blocking other objectives (Positives). This last ones last only until turn 1400, so you can pass them after that with no consequence.

And I'm proud to tell you that at least one of those 3 modifications are being included in the official imagine cup SDK! =)

Hoy a las 21 hs (hora argentina) empieza el primer match de la categoría de algoritmos de Imagine Cup

En la primer ronda hay que "programar" un robotito llamado Herbert para que pise unos puntos blancos en un mapa relativamente pequeño, mediante un lenguaje llamado H, que consta de solamente 3 instrucciones:

• s: Para moverse hacia adelante un casillero
• r: para girar a la derecha
• l: Para girar a la izquierda

Fácil, no?
Bueno, el concepto es sencillo, pero agregándole funciones, recursión, y cantidad máxima de bytes por nivel, se empieza a complicar y ponerse entretenido

Como siempre, pueden anotarse en http://www.imaginecup.com para competir, y pueden ver un tutorial e instrucciones en http://www.wildnoodle.com/ic2008al/UI/tutorial.aspx

Así se ve el programa que se usa

Suerte!