Traditionally, teams of three compete in the two rounds of Deadline24 - the qualification round that takes five hours, and the final 24-hour marathon. This year, the finals took place in the Silesian Museum in Katowice. The choice of location is one of the contest’s features - in other years, it took place in different places like contemporary art galleries or an old mine, where participants had to work while being 320 meters beneath the ground.
Thirty teams passed the qualification round; Gennady’s Xeighdoughotiqueue team, as well as a team of ITMO’s students including Vladimir Smukalov, Ivan Belonogov and Ilya Zban competed with students from universities of Helsinki, Warsaw, Poznan, Moscow and others.
The Xeighdoughotiqueue team got 352.52 points in the final round, thus getting more than 100 points more than the AIM Tech team that got second place. The third place went to Polish HoRyxoGon team that got 219.26 points.
Deadline24. Credit: social networks
According to Gennady Korotkevich, the tasks in the finals had to do with gaming. For each of them, there were several servers that worked 24 hours; team members had to work with these servers: get information about the current state of a game and make new moves. The points were calculated on the server based on a player’s actions. At the same time, the teams didn’t have to send in the codes for their actions, only the actions they did - thus, they could even play manually without having to write any programs. Yet, as the time given for deciding on every move was about 1 second, that would have surely been too tiring and not effective at all.
“The tasks were really interesting and diverse. For instance, one of the tasks this year was something like a 3D tetris game. For me, the main difficulty of Deadline24 is that it’s very intense. In 24 hours, you don’t only have to think up, code and debug a good strategy, but also monitor your opponents’ strategies so as to not fall behind. And you also have to find some time to sleep a bit, otherwise it will be hard for you to concentrate towards the end of the contest, comments Gennady Korotkevich. Last year, our team got 3rd place, which was also a very good accomplishment. This year, it seems that we got slightly luckier, as we could think up really good strategies against our opponents.”
The contest’s winners received 3D printers as prizes, the runner-ups - projecting cameras and action cameras Go Pro Hero.
Deadline24 contests have been conducted since 2009. During these nine years, the contest has grown from a small event for programming fans to an international championship. In different years, teams from Great Britain, USA, Spain, South Africa and many other countries took part in it.
