Just got back from MechMania, a 19-hour (10 a.m. to 10 a.m., with five hours of mandatory break) Articifial Intelligence/C++ programming competition in which you have to write programs to strategically control battle mechs to mine resources and destroy the enemy team. Andres, Evan, and I (our team name was The Outsourced Foreign Half-Wage Laborers) drove down to Urbana on Friday afternoon and checked into the hotel and whatnot. Saturday we programmed hardcore. Evan wrote the A* path-finding algorithm in the morning, I wrote a good chunk of the core mech behavior (which was designed to result in emergent strategic behavior), and Andres tweaked mech creation and enemy targeting so that it was AWESOME. We started passing out around 6:00. Sunday was the final showdown... when all 14 of the teams (from an original 16) competed in a double-elimination tournament on a special set of maps that we hadn't yet seen. We made it to the finals and got second place!!!! :D We rock! We even beat Sean (my brilliant programming archrival and CS friend)! And this was our first time going to MechMania, and our first attempt at AI. :D And mother of god, you need to see our code. It's HIDEOUS. Code here. shell.cpp is the biggie. Gotta do it again next year!