4th place at Google Ship Wars 2012

Yesterday I attended the Google Ship Wars 2012 event. It was held at Google’s Kitchener office, which is in the same building as Well.ca’s Kitchener office. I heard about the event from one of my teammates and decided to go have some fun. I ended up at 4th place and only had one single losing match.

There were sandwiches, candies, and drinks which I consumed before the competition started. The organizers spent about 45 mins explaining the rules of the game and off we go. I decided to write my bot in Java because it’s the best tool for the job for me. Everybody had 1.5 hours to write their bot and during that time you could challenge each other to head-to-head matches to get a sense of where your bot is at. I won 3 prizes from the 3 head-to-head matches I did and won. After the 1.5-hour is up, a recruiter showed us around the office. Afterwards we came back and they unveiled the result. I tied for 4th place with 5200 points. 3rd place had 5600 points, which means I was 4 wins short of 3rd place. They also allowed us to view results of individual matches. My matches against the top 3 were either ties or wins but no losses.

In the end they gave everyone a SWAG bag filled with some Android stuff and random fun things. Generally a pretty fun night!

Update: Pictures from the event