Pravega's GNIDOC attracted the crowd with its unique theme

It is the first day of Pravega and it is already showering bugs.Full of prizes, we mean. Reverse Coding proved to be the smash hit of the day with more than 25 teams from all around Bangalore fighting it out for glory in Reverse Coding, or shall we say, Gnidoc? A novel game of pattern recognition turned into a crowd puller because of its innovative approach towards coding. The questions consisted of some given executable files, which the teams had to crack by playing around with inputs and recognising patterns in the outputs. In a nutshell, the teams had to manipulate the results and come up with a pattern and express it in terms of an executable computer code for that bit of the file.

The event was divided into two parts, Prelims and Finals. The Prelims were meant for straining out the neophytes in Coding for the main event, Gnidoc Finals. Clearly, putting bugs in and then taking them out is not a particularly easy thing to do! The Prelims started at noon in the lecture hall of the Old Physics Building and continued for an hour.

26 teams of three (or in some cases, two) participated in the Prelims. The participants were mainly undergraduates, along with a few nerdy high school students. The questions in the Prelims were basically designed to test the ability of the participants to decode the hidden patterns in sequences of outputs and their corresponding inputs.

The Finals involved 6 teams fighting it out in the UG Computer Science Lab from 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. Finally, after two hours of intense coding, a team consisting of three high school kids emerged as the winner. The fact that all the other teams were composed of Computer Science undergraduates made their victory even sweeter. Prajwal, Ankith and Rakshith, all students of the eleventh grade from different Bangalore schools, won on a tie break, solving the harder problems among the tied teams. Programming glory and prizes worth 10K await them!

The artists in the UG department of IISc were covering the event through their live drawing. Ultimately, everyone returned a winner, with bugs or without them, discussing Java, C and C++ as the Pravega Man called it a day for the first of the 3 days of fun, frolic an