Battle of the Minds Round 2! and Day 2

Day 2 started off interestingly with the hosts presenting a video recap of Day 1's events. All the anxiety and tension of the participants was caught on camera before their respective events. Next the Final round of the WIT event began.....

The finals of the WIT event was not only informative but mind blowingly difficult.
Participants endured 5 rounds of IT quizzing at IT's best. There was ,however, a tie between National Hill view Public School and Frank Anthony Public School which the team from Frank Anthony's won with out breaking a sweat. So the teams that made it to the finals were Delhi Public School South, St.Joseph's PUC, National Public School Kormangala and Indiranagar, and National Academy for Learning and not to mention Frank Anthony Public School.

The first round was called Boot there were 12 questions 2 for each team. 10 points were awarded for a direct questions and 10 points for a bonus. However there was a twist to the quiz. Teams could attach a "virus" to a question. If that question is not answered correctly by all teams that team get 10 points. If there is an answer to that question the team loses 5 points.

Round 1 was not as difficult as expected some of the questions were:
1.A picture of an email was shown and the participants had to identify it.
Answer: The email was from vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's hacked Yahoo! email id.

2.A picture of a form with math questions was shown.Participants needed to identify the reason for the form.
Answer: The form prevented users from sending emails in a drunk state and regret sending later.

Round 2 was called Firsts. The questions asked were based on famous firsts in IT history.Questions ranged from the first virus in space to first URL ever created.

Round 3 was called Write Bros. 10 visuals were shown and participants identified them by writing them down. At the end of the round the answers were given and each team corrected another teams answer script. Some of the questions were, a picture of the Pirate Bay logo with GTA San Andreas characters and font was shown and teams needed to identify what the logo commemorated, and a vintage ad of the original Apple advertisements was shown and teams were to identify the company.

Round 4 was called Geek Quotient. Questions in this round were based on IT events that do not make it to the mainstream media. This was the toughest round by far as teams needed to know IT events that most of them had never heard of.

Round 5 was the last round of normal quizzing and was called Code Breaker. Teams were given clues and had to guess the company based on the clues. However the points awarded were made progressively less as the clues were given (there were 3 per question).

Round 6 was the last round and was the Buzzer round. There were 10 questions and if any of the teams knew the answer to the given question they had to press the buzzer to answer. However if a team did not answer correctly they would lose 5 points also only one team could answer at any point in time if they got it wrong the question would be passed to the audience.

In the end the team from St.Joseph's PUC came out on top with 150 points. The team from Frank Anthony Public School came second with 125 points.

Open Discussion

The technocrat event held an open discussion among participants about trends in IT. Participants voiced their opinions on topics given by the judges.

The first topic was Intellectual Property Right Infringements. Some suggested piracy protection at the operating system or program level. Others suggested that ISP level protection should be in place. Many were in agreement that expansion of DRM (Digital Rights Management) was necessary to combat piracy. However one suggested piracy prevention should go beyond DRM to legislative reforms as many countries (such as Sweden) had loopholes allowing digital pirates to flourish.

The next topic discussed was Windows Vista versus Apple Mac which was better? Those who favored the Mac said it was user friendly as compared to Vista and was a lot safer as well. The plus point of the Vista was however that a regular non-IT computer user would most likely choose Vista as it serves all his computing needs.

Finally a hypothetical situation was discussed Yahoo! sells all its shares to Google what would be its impact? The negative impacts discussed were that with out competition Google would leave nothing new for consumers and there would be problems regarding IM clients as Yahoo! recently allowed users to add their friends on Windows Live Messenger to their friends list and IM them and that Google's GMail service might interfere with this.

Gamers Unite!

Gaming has certainly gone places. Video Games have gone from being the hobby of computer geeks to a multi-billion dollar industry stretching all over the world. 

Synchronize 2008 organized a tribute to gaming with an event called Quad Damage. Here participants choose to compete in either the Unreal Tournament 2004(PC)  or the Halo 3 (XBOX 360) tournaments. 

Halo 3, designed by Bungie Studios and Microsoft, is a revolution on it's own. The Halo phenomenon started with the first and second Halo games on the original XBOX console. The first person shooter action and stunning visual effects had gamers hooked either playing the campaign mode over and over again on the infamous Legendary mode or playing online with the XBOX live system. When Halo 3 came out on the XBOX 360 console it was received with a mixed reaction one of sadness that the series had come to a close and one of elation at the even better visual effects and expanded gameplay.

Synchronize 2008 had gamers play Halo 3 on the XBOX 360 . The tournament was split into to 2 the seeding round and the knockout round. The seeding round was a sort of practice to allow participants to get the feel of the game and study the other gamers style of play. The knockout round consisted of 4 minute matches played on random maps using the team slayer game. The teams knocked each other out of the tournament in a bid to play at the Finals held at the Auditorium.

  

from the top:Participants battling it out to stay in the game,Master Chief the main character of the Halo series, A screenshot of the multiplayer campaign mode played during the seeding round.

The second game featured was Unreal Tournament 2004 for the PC. The Unreal Tournament(UT) series is a pioneer in first person shooters on the PC. UT paved the way for popular shooters like Counter Strike and Half-Life. 

Synchronize 2008 had players use their wits to stay alive in an intense free for all match up.

Well over 20 players were playing in one arena and hence many players ended up going on killing sprees racking up kills and at the same time refusing to be killed.

 

IT Puzzle Solvers.....

The basis of IT is programming languages. They provide an interface between us and computers. The Turing Test event was a challenge to participants not only think logically but on their feet as well. 

The preliminary round had competitors solve problems based on logic and develop algorithms in various computer languages such as C,C++,C#,and JAVA. It was a written round where one had to write down (in ones computer language of choice) algorithms and solve multiple choice logic based questions. The event was a really tough and some participants didn't finish the test. 

The teams with the highest score in the preliminary round will participate in the finals tomorrow.The final round will have the participants write code and submit working algorithms to the judges to score points.

 

The participants slogging it out.

Verbal Wars

The other event that kicked off Synchronize 2008 was the Clash of the Titans event.
Here participants debated on an IT topic and were either for or against the given topic. The topic for the preliminary round was on the monopoly Microsoft has over the software industry.

The sub-topics discussed ranged from the eternal browser war to the supposed underhanded cost cutting strategies employed by Microsoft. Those against the topic accused Microsoft of using dirty tricks to get sales and a larger market share. This included forcing manufacturers to install Internet Explorer (A web browser developed by Microsoft and the browser you're most probably using to view this page) and no other browser in their computers.

Those for the topic said Microsoft is like any other business that requires profit to run and whose sole aim is profit. They went on to say that it is up to Microsoft's competitors to develop products that even Microsoft will have difficulty competing with (such as the Apple Ipod which Microsoft has yet to provide a substantial counter - product)

Participants challenging each other to think harder.

The Battle of the Minds. Round 1!

Synchronize 2008 started off with a couple events one of which was the WIT event.
Participants were asked to answer questions based on the world of IT. The questions proved to be anything but easy. Here's a few examples :

In short which company's name is derived from a stream also known as Casa Grande Creek flowing in Southern California?
Answer: Adobe

What was this Google doodle in commemoration of ?
Answer : EDIT: I found out it celebrates TCP/IP !!

What was this comic drawn for?
Answer: EDIT: Found this one out too its a comic based on the new Google Chrome Browser

As you can see competitors should have really known their IT facts before passing through to the next round. Not all the questions were pictures or actually..... questions in the literal sense of the term some were audio or video clips participants had to identify.

Tomorrow the hosts will provide the answers to the preliminary round questions as well as conduct the final round. The highest scoring teams proceed to the final round.

Starting off with a BANG!!

Thursday October 23 saw the beginning of a new innovative competition at bishop Cottons Boys School. Synchronize 2008 is a new approach to IT competition far from the usual programming contests or quizzes.

Synchronize is divided into different events each requiring a knowledge and expertise of various fields of Information Technology. The events are Blogger, Technocrat, The Turing Test, Clash of the Titans, Event X, Brand Value, and Quad Damage. All the events listed will be covered in later posts.

First participants were treated to an amazing opening ceremony. The ceremony included a recital of the school song and a rock themed rendition of..... what you can call the Synchronize theme song. Followed by the unveiling of the mysterious Event X. I must say that participants who entered the event are the bravest people I will ever see. Participants were told to choose among a couple sheets which would detail the event they would participate in. This meant an entrant would have to enter any one of the events without being told which event they would be participating beforehand (like the rest of the competitors), or any prior practice.

After the event selection the principal Col. John Ellis declared the competition open in true IT style... with the press of a button .