A night of fun and games
05.05.06 4:00 PM


By omgrace
TopCoder Member

For the past two days, competitors have been going head-to-head in the arena, solving problems at the speed of light (okay maybe not THAT fast, but still - everyone is solving these problems faster than my wireless connection). Here are my pictures of me competing in today’s wildcard tournament:



...as you can see, I qualified for the event and they gave me my own computer so I could...



...be the ONLY one to solve the 1000 point problem! Actually, andrewzta solved it during the wildcard tournament to qualify for the finals - w00t!

After all of today’s competitions, everyone headed to:



...to have dinner and play video games (did anyone know that Gameworks served real food?). I have a ton of pictures from the night, but here are my favorites:

kalmakka is practicing for tonight’s tournament while davidyang looks on in amazement.



TopCoders in their natural habitat...behind a monitor.



Remember how I mentioned that if someone challenged another competitor there were no hard feelings? I guess reid didn’t take it so well! :-)



Petr and pparys going crazy and kicking and punching for no reason. (Actually, it was a cool game that had motion sensors everywhere).



Don’t mess with me...I’m Rambo.



davidyang and I fighting zombies:



Everyone seemed to really enjoy themselves and air hockey actually turned out to be a really popular game to play:



...but it wasn’t as popular as Dance Dance REVOLUTION!

I watched the MTV special on video games, which included a little snippet of some people playing DDR, but watching it up close was a totally different story. The guys here aren’t only amazing programmers, they’re also amazing dancers (in the DDR world, at least). I know you guys were all waiting for this movie, so here you go:



Here’s SnapDragon and JongMan afterwards, COMPLETELY wiped out:



Everyone was really good at DDR - especially antimatter, SnapDragon, JongMan, Eryx and TopCoder’s own ntrefz. Here’s another short clip of Eryx in a dance off:



I thought it was particularly funny the way Eryx jumped because it looked like SnapDragon and JongMan tried to stay close to the ground.

I’ll be back with another contest later - be sure to stay tuned!