A break from blogging
Over the past 2 months I've taken a break from blogging.During that time I've spent a week in the Kruger park, worked crazy hours on a software architecture investigation for a client, and worked equally crazy hours in my spare time on the 2013 Entelect Artificial Intelligence competition.
This blog post is a recap of those 3 activities.
The Kruger Park
I took my family camping at Punda Maria campsite in the Northern section of the Kruger Park from 14 to 19 July.Back in 2008 we had one or our best Kruger trips ever in that part of the park, seeing no less than 4 leopard, including an excellent sighting where the leopard was metres from our car. So we had extolled the virtues of Northern Kruger to our friends John and Sarah, who were accompanying us with their 3 children.
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| A leopard sighting from our trip to Northern Kruger in October 2008 |
In my opinion, Northern Kruger is the most beautiful part of the Kruger park, particularly the area near the Pafuri picnic site and along the Nyala drive. So although we were disappointed at not seeing any of the big cats, we still enjoyed our visit immensely.
Northern Kruger has a reputation for being a birders' paradise, and we certainly saw our fair share of beautiful birds. I even managed to capture a Lilac-Breasted Roller in flight, something I had tried many times before without success.
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| A lilac-breasted roller in flight |
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| A korhaan sighting on the way back from Pafuri |
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| A hornbill that scavenges left-overs at the Babalala picnic area |
An architectural investigation
On returning from Kruger, I jumped straight into a 4 week architectural investigation for a client. The client was concerned about their dependence on a 3rd party integration hub whose host was experiencing financial uncertainty. My role was to assist the client in understanding their IT ecosystem, assess their and their business partners' dependencies on the 3rd party vendor, and provide a roadmap (with estimated costs) for mitigating the risk.This is very different from the work that I do on a day to day basis. Most of the time I am one of the software designers/architects on a team of 25 to 30 developers, testers, business analysts, architects and project managers. I spend my day doing UML diagrams for new features, assisting developers when requested, estimating task sizes, performing code reviews, troubleshooting performance issues, and so forth. In other words, I am very much a cog in a bigger machine.
With the architectural investigation I was on my own. I had complete autonomy to carry out the investigation as I saw fit. I love doing investigative work. I love work that has strategic impact. I love feeling my way towards a solution. So I revelled in this independence.
Although exciting, it was very intense work too. On Friday 16 August I gave a presentation of my findings to the technical stakeholders. I worked right through the night on both the Tuesday and Thursday night beforehand, clocking over 25 hours of work on Tuesday and Wednesday, and over 27 hours on Thursday and Friday.
I've done all-nighters before in my career. But never two in one week. It's definitely not something I would recommend...
I was very happy with the outcome of the work though, and the presentation seemed to go very well, despite getting off to a slow start due to my lack of sleep and the adrenalin of putting the finishing touches to the presentation only minutes before the meeting started!
The final presentation to the executive committee took place the following Tuesday. The previous presentation had included a lot more technical detail, and the focus had been on presenting a wide variety of options. The final presentation was much more condensed, and focused on 2 primary recommendations. The presentation went extremely well, and the feedback was very positive - both from the customer's CFO and from a number of my superiors at Dariel.
A few days later I was asked whether I would like to do similar investigations in future. I replied that this was similar to asking someone who has just completed the Comrades Ultra-marathon whether they would like to do it again next year!
The 2013 Entelect AI Challenge
Last year I participated in the inaugural Entelect R 100,000 Artificial Intelligence Challenge. I was delighted to place 4th out of 101 contestants.I was really hoping to better that this year. However the 2013 challenge took place over the same period as the trip to Kruger and the architectural investigation. Additionally, last year's contestants had from mid-July until 24 September to submit their entries. This year the closing date was 2nd September. So there was simply less time to recover from the long hours on the architectural investigation.
This year's competition was to program two tanks to take on two other tanks on one of 8 boards, up to 81x81 squares in size, in a simultaneous movement tank battle based loosely on the 1980's arcade game Battle City, and using SOAP web services to communicate to the server. This was a massive jump in complexity from last year's competition, which was a Tron-like turn-based game with one unit per player, played on a 30x30 sphere with communication via reading and writing a text file.
If I was a wiser man, I would have thrown in the towel before even starting. Fortunately I'm not!
I started my career as an Operations Research consultant at the CSIR and I still retain a strong passion for decision optimization and decision automation. My outlet for that passion is entering competitions like the Entelect AI Challenge.
It's also a great way to keep my coding skills current, as my role as a software designer means that I don't get to write as much production code as I would like.
So, against my better judgement, and despite all obstacles, I have participated in the Entelect programming challenge again this year! It's been very tiring and the stress levels have been immense. I have barely lurched over the finish line, assisted in no small measure by the final entry date being extended by a week from 2nd September to Monday 9th September.
But at least I have managed to complete an entry. And one that I'm reasonably proud of, even though I don't think it will be good enough to get me to the final 8 like last year.
The camaraderie last year was amazing, and the way the contestants have assisted and encouraged each other in this year's competition has been no less amazing. You would never guess we were competing with each other for a prize of R 100,000 (roughly $10,000). That's a lot of money and the prize for second place is tiny by comparison. But you'd never guess it by the way contestants have generously shared advice with each other, and encouraged each other to keep going when it gets tough. And believe me, this has been a very tough challenge this year (as shown by the far smaller number of people who got as far as submitting an entry).
The play-offs for the competition take place tomorrow evening at the Fire and Ice Protea Hotel in Melrose Arch, Johannesburg. I will be there to share in that spirit of camaraderie again.
Although my expectations for my bot are low, my hopes are high. I'm hoping that my bot gives it horns...
... and that some remaining bug doesn't sabotage my efforts and leave me meekly hiding in the shadows!
What comes next?
I'm still busy with a couple of blog postings for the problem of calculating the last person left in a circle if every second person is asked to leave. I hope to post those shortly and close off the series.I worked out a few very nice algorithms for the Battle City AI challenge. So I'd like to write a series of articles on those as well. I'd also like to analyse some of the mistakes I made in the competition, and what I would do differently if I could start over.
And once my bot is knocked out the competition I'm planning on posting the code for my entry to GitHub.
I suspect this will be of interest to the other contestants in the competition (we have already been doing post-mortems of our strategies on the unofficial google groups forum for the competition). But it may also have a few nice ideas that will be useful to people competing in other AI competitions in future.
So please keep a lookout for those!
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