Los Angeles – 2018. The Earth’s surface is ravaged by a merciless struggle against the machines controlled by Skynet, the all powerful, autonomous artificial intelligence program. You are John Connor, leader of the Resistance. Your objective: destroy Skynet. Your weapon: Code.
It is in this apocalyptic context that several million among you joined the resistance the last 26th of April. The mission was not the easiest: to defeat Skynet, the strategy involved infecting several Moto-Terminators with a lethal virus able to destroy Skynet. The problem: to reach the QG, it was necessary to direct the motorbikes remotely across a bridge riddled with potholes.
PODIUM AND RANKINGS
There were 1443 of you to begin the adventure, among whom 837 finished. Congrats to everyone!
We counted 27 finishers who obtained a 100%, which is quite revealing as to the difficulty of the challenge (the average was a 34%). Overall, the average time to finish the challenge was 3:13:00.
iku topped the leaderboard, receiving a 100% in Java in 1:33:00, followed closely by Manger (C#/C++) and NewboO who brilliantly pulled himself up to the 3rd step of the podium in PHP.
If it was not easy to do so during the competition, you can now enjoy yourself by re-watching the replays of the participants and the journeys of the motorbikes on the magnificent suspended bridge over turquoise waters 🙂 (use the “play” buttons next to the validators by clicking {} in the leaderboard).
THE PUZZLES
1st puzzle: Skynet – The Chasm
In this puzzle, you control a Moto-Terminator. The objective is to isolate the motorbike on a platform located at the end of a bridge and separated from this bridge by a gulf. It was necessary to solve this puzzle in 3 steps:
1) Adjust and optimize one’s speed in order to be able to make the jump without too much force.
2) Jump the chasm
3) Once on the other side, break very quickly to stop oneself without skidding off of the platform and falling.
No major difficulty here, a few “if”’s and that was all!
2nd puzzle: Skynet – The Bridge
You had only to make a final effort to reach Skynet, the QG being located on the other side of a bridge riddled with dangerous potholes, liable at any moment to cause the Moto-Terminators to disappear into the void. You had 4 bikes, the final goal being to arrive with the greatest number of bikes at the lair of Skynet. It was thus necessary to have the motorbikes circulate on the bridge while avoiding obstacles, knowing that the bikes could perform several different actions (accelerate, decelerate, jump…).
From an algorithmic point of view, the difficulty was to decelerate since there was no other possible algorithm than to use brute force with depth first search to explore all the possible movements of the motorbikes.
(You can redo Skynet Revolution via the training page)
LANGUAGE POPULARITY
Java and C++ were still largely favored by participants, and Java progressed whereas C++ was a little less used than for the previous challenge. Interestingly, we welcomed significantly more Javascript, Pascal and Perl programmers this time.
And the name of the only one contestant who coded in Clojure is iridaoc. 😉
