The same weekend of the CEC, however, is the annual CS Games competition which is being hosted in Sherbrooke. I have spent the past month struggling to put together a team, and was extremely proud of the strong responses I got from computer science and software engineering students here at Concordia. We managed to register a compliment of two full teams, many of whom are in their first and second years of school. I couldn’t be happier! We’re going to bring these greenhorns to Sherbrooke for fun, friendly, nerdy competition and lots of partying. I’ve been coordinating with the team from ETS for us to share a bus down to Sherbrooke. They’ll be teaching our team French drinking songs while we’ll be teaching them the English ones. Cultural exchange for the win!

This is my last semester of school, and I’ve been looking forward to CS Games 2008 since … well, since the last CS Games. It’s my chance to go out with a bang, to party one last time with friends from all the Québec schools, a number of Ontario schools, and from all over North America. More than anything, I want to be the one to lead my team of mostly-freshmen to the battlefields of Université de Sherbrooke and show them what it means to represent your school, your friends and flaunt your knowledge and nerdly status. Then I get to pass along the torch, and these froshies will be the ones organizing the trip to CS Games next year. Maybe they can even get it hosted at Concordia in 2010! I have such high hopes for this new batch of students and I want to teach them everything I’ve learned over my years of student involvement. I’ll be able to get my team to mingle with other schools, forge alliances and friendships that will lead them on to be supreme powers in inter-university events. CS Games is my chance to do that; and I feel like it’s my last chance.

Now I’ve got myself stuck in this pretty sticky situation. CS Games and the Canadian Engineering Competition are mutually exclusive. They overlap completely, and there’s no way I can go to both. I can’t let down the other three members of my Consulting Engineering team – they’re convinced they need me. Apparently, in the national competition you’re allowed access to the internet, so my Google Fu will come in handy. Considering this is the first time Concordia has ever sent teams to the CEC, I would love to be a part of the inaugural team, boldly going where no Concordian has gone before. I want to be there to represent my university, and more importantly to represent my province. I’m proud to be a Québecker, and I want to join with the other Québec teams in drink and song and competition, especially before I move away to Ontario. While I’ve attended previous CS Games competitions, I’ve never been to CEC before. The pressure to attend CEC is terrible.

I wish I could fork a new process¹ so that I could attend both competitions, then merge together again. But alas, there’s only one of me. I can’t go to both. I have no idea what I’m going to do … but I feel like I’m being torn apart and it’s depressing me. I put off thinking about it for the weekend, but now I can’t stop thinking about it.

“Consulting Engineering” is this: You and your team are locked in a room for 6 hours with a case study problem statement which includes a ton of data. You have access to a computer, but no access to the internet. There is an intranet forum where teams can ask questions (and of course, other teams can see your questions and the subsequent answers from the judges). Your team’s goal is to put together a presentation (to be presented the next day) and an “Executive Summary” document outlining your solution to the problem given, along with its economic feasibility, rationale, calculations, and everything.

Our team of four (Wally, Kevin, Greg and myself) spent our six hours trying to determine whether a small fleet of oil tanker ships would benefit from traveling through new routes in Canada’s north as oppose to through the Panama canal. The new routes were shown to be shorter, but we would need to factor in the costs of reinforcing the ships hulls to withstand potential iceberg collisions, as well as a the risk involved should a collision occur and oil were to spill into the sea. Thus we also needed to design a collision detection system and a spill recovery system to deal with these scenarios.

We crunched numbers like there was no tomorrow. This is where I started to find myself being useful. I don’t know how to calculate shear strength of steel or the forces of heavy oil tankers as they act on gigantic icebergs, but I can use computers. I monopolized the computer, basically tabulating everything imaginable into an Excel spreadsheet using the numbers and equations my team were feeding me. I actually got to row AB. I’ve never gone anyway near row AB before. Our “Executive Summary” therefore consisted of some formulas (typeset in the new Office 2007 equation editor) and some tables copied and pasted with data from excel, but stylized with Word 2007’s autoformatting tools. And our powerpoint presentation? Well, the template was provided to us by the talented Nik Brovkin, but the content was thrown together in five minutes and prettied up with Smart Art.

And now I understand what “Consulting Engineering” really is: professional bullshitting. We pulled numbers and equations out of our ass. We took the data we were given and manipulated it every way imaginable. It was no real surprise when, at the end of the 6 hours, we were showing a net profit of over $21 billion. And then we put the data tables into our presentation and handed them in, keeping a copy for ourselves. Back at the hotel, we were reflecting on our numbers and practicing our presentation when our wits started to come back to us …. $21 billion is way too much. So we recalculated our numbers. It turns out that I had put a minus sign in the denominator of an equation instead of a plus sign. This made our numbers astronomically large. Oops.

Now we were faced with a dilemma. Do we present the numbers in our presentation, since we can’t change it, and act confident about it? Or do we come clean and say that we made a mistake in our calculations, and give the judges the new numbers? We decided to go for honesty. When it came time to talk about the data, I said “Being responsible engineers, we made sure to double check our calculations again and again. And while we were going over every last detail of our data, we noticed that we had made an error in our presentation, and the numbers in one of these data tables are grossly exaggerated…”. Believe it or not, this seemed to earn us major points with the judges. When we mentioned that it was a little error of a minus instead of a plus in the denominator, they gave us a knowing smile as if to say “yup, that happens all the time …”

We walked out of that presentation with a good feeling.

Later that night at the banquet, we had our hopes up. We thought that might be in a position to actually win an award. But we were still shocked when we were called up as the winners of the special award for Technical Excellence. This is an award that could have gone to any team at CQI, from any category. And yet we got it. Wow. We went back to our tables pretty satisfied, and we had the slight feeling that our award was nothing more than a consolation prize. Which means we were really surprised when we called up because we finished in 2nd place overall for Consulting Engineering.

The first and second place teams from each competition get to advance to the national level: the Canadian Engineering Competition. This is huge. Not only did our team place second, but Concordia’s Senior Design team placed 1st. This is apparently the first time Concordia’s ever had teams to send to the CEC, and we’ve got two. I can’t even begin to describe how proud I was to be a part of all of this, and how proud I am of my team.

I will now share with you our two secrets to success.

1. We all went to the RnD party at ETS the night before our presentation.
2. We demolished a mickey of vodka immediately before our presentation. It took just the right amount of edge off.

However, the CEC takes place from March 6th to 9th … which will be the subject of my next post.

(Actually, I think I actually came in 5th … there was a mistake in the rankings chart. Brad was ahead of me by two points).

But before I get into the details, I’ll give you some context.

Last night was a party and a half. I’ve been meeting up with so many people here in Toronto: Linda and Brit who came down to visit from Waterloo; Erik (Rickster) who came from Fort McMurray, AB where he’s been for far too long; Alex and Trelaine and Chris from University of Ottawa that I met at CUTC this year; Mark from Waterloo; and Jackie from Infusion, whom I’ve run into and virtually every conference event this year, and Kurtis, CEO of one of the Infusion-related companies. Jackie recommended Madison Pub, so we went there.

Microsoft gave us all American Express gift cards with 125 “points” on them. 1 point = 1 US Dollar. It’s supposed to be used for the taxi cab to/from the airport as well as dinner. Well, a lot of places don’t take American Express – taxis included. Luckily, the pub did. So we all opened up tabs.

After the drinking (and lots of nerd talk), Jackie and Kurtis led Guillaume, Rickster and I to Burrito Boyz – which was packed. To add to the randomness, I ran into Bob and Jeff from McMaster there. They’re not even here for ImagineCup, they were just getting burritos. The burrito was delicious. And huge. I wasn’t hungry at all today and could barely eat breakfast or lunch. So much fun!

So I get back to the hotel at 4:15am, where I meet my roomate, Lucas, since my key card mysteriously ceased to function and I woke him up with my repeated attempts. Two hours later we wake up shower and head to breakfast at the MaRS centre.

Of course, nearly all the delegates from Quebec were hung-over. But that’s no problem, I’m used to coding hungover (thanks, CS Games). About a third into the competition, I had implemented the entire problem with the exception of the shortest-path algorithm, and jumped up to 2nd place. I then spent a lot of time researching Dijkstra’s algorithm, which I should know, and have definitely learned, but couldn’t for the life of me remember how to implement. Eventually I got bumped down to 5th place and kind of stayed there. At the end of the competition they announced a 4-way tie for 4th, and so there are 7 people in total going to Seattle in June for the finals!

So tonight, we celebrate!