Here's the coding contest - each player goes against another, with 1 minute in a game to hack bugs away. Here's Kevin hacking:
Now Blaine sits down - let's see if his client stays up. Nope - he's hacking:
Nope - Blaine goes down, Kevin wins by default. So now we have Michael against Kevin - the game is afoot. Looks like Kevin is hacking a hard coding of "localhost". Kevin fixes the bug, and we have a game going - looks like a stall, not a walkback for Kevin. He's hacking at it:
And he got that addressed, the game goes on. Michael wins, and Blaine is back up against Michael. Probably back to the debugger. Yep, Blaine is trying to fix his bug, but no move - Michael wins round two. So, we have Kevin vs. Blaine - will we get a move - nope, Blaine heads back to the debugger:
Blaine loses by default, so we have Michael playing Kevin again. This should just run, now that all the bugs are fixed - the moves are happening. Michael loses to Kevin, so there's a tie for the lead. Now we have Michael vs. Blaine again - will Blaine head back to the debugger? Yep - he's up there again. Looks like Blaine's client might not be waiting for Michael to move, which is causing illegal moves unless Alan intervenes at the server. No fix - Blaine is down and out.
So we are now trying to see if the two clients - Kevin's and Michael's - are deterministic based on who goes first. We now try each in position 1 and 2 again. Seems to be deterministic - the first game ran exactly like the first time - the second one as well.
Here's a (not great) shot of the game screen:
So, the tiebreaker - we run Alan's simple minded "play the smallest coin possible" client playing against each. Alan vs. Kevin: Kevin beats Alan's client twice. Reset, we try Michael vs. Alan: Michael's client lost by one - now we try again, just for completeness: Michael wins as player 2. However, Kevin won the tiebreaker both times, which ranks it out:
- Kevin Badinger - Check for $1000
- Michael Lucas-Smith - iPod
- Blaine Buxton - iPod Shuffle
So - congratulations to the finalists, and to all the entrants - see you all at next year's contest!