Sponsoring the Code War was a total blast. I think everyone there had a really good time. Everyone definitely put everything they had into it with 8 super-intense hours of design and coding. And everyone created a good A.I. We will definitely do this again next year.
Which leads to the question, is a gaming A.I. a good problem for a code war? Even for a simple game this is a task that normally will take 1 – 3 programmers weeks to months. On the flip side, it is possible to create an A.I. that is competent in a day. Poor compared to a 2 month effort, but still superior to random moves.
But let's step back and look at the purpose of the games. Google's Code Jam is designed to find them the best programmers for writing the fastest server code. And that serves them well for finding people that can further optimize their code that servers billions of requests a day. Microsoft's Imagine Cup is designed to get people to create useful applications using Microsoft products. And that serves them well exposing more people to the Microsoft suite of development tools. HP's Code Wars is for High School students and is designed to provide a fun event for the students.
For Windward we have two sets of goals with the code wars. My personal goal is to create a fun event for the students who love programming. I also want to give incoming students an event where they can get to know the others in the C.S. department (when I started as a freshman at C.U. I knew no one and it was a bit lonely at first). And I like creating a competition where people are celebrated for their brain power rather than their athletic skills.
Now to sell it to my company (this costs about 1K to put on and takes about a week of my time), we have the company goals. Those goals are to contribute to the community, be the #1 choice for internships, and for participants to remember Windward and consider us when they need reporting, docgen, or B.I. software.
So based on what I want to accomplish from this, I want the contest to be intellectually challenging, push the participants to their limits (and a bit beyond), and give them a sense of well-deserved accomplishment at the end. But I don't care what the code in particular does. Nor do I care about the operating system or language. Because we're not trying to measure any particular skill nor promote any particular environment or products.
I do think a game is also fun because instead of the result being a score for each team with the high score winning, instead you watch robots move on the board and shoot each other as you are following your robot cheering for it when it makes a good move. The play-off is a lot more interesting.
So please comment below with your opinion as to what type of problem(s) we should present and any other suggestions for next time.
The next time we are going to set it up where we talk to each entry over TCP/IP where we pass a problem across in an XML file and get the solution back in an XML file. This will make it easy to write a solution in any language on any operating system. Half the contestants were using IronPython and VisualStudio was missing basics like code complete for python (yuck!). (With that said, the best two entries were written in Python so it wasn't too bad of an environment.) But if it's a simple XML file sent across the wire, then each team can use any environment they wish and will have the tools they know the best.
There absolutely will be another contest at C.U. at the start of next Fall's semester. So for those of you at C.U. who participated, tell your friends.
But I also have a request from my youngest daughter who goes to Harvey Mudd to sponsor a Code War there at the start of this Spring semester. So I am going to contact Mudd, CalTech, and MIT and see if they are interested in having a group competition this upcoming January.
And finally a thank you to Professor Ken Anderson who made this happen at the C.U. end and spent his Saturday at the event. And thank you to all the students who participated – you all made it well worth the time I put in on this in how much you enjoyed it.
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Adds various capabilities such as inequalities,descending sort, joins, and other functions.
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SQL Select Debugger
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Added a Query tab as a field for typing or pasting in a select statement
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All tags using that Data source will be automatically updated with that name.
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New single interface to replace 2 separate dialog boxes
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Displays of all the tags in the template, structured as they are placed in the template. This provides a simple & intuitive way to see the structure of your template. Also provides the capability to go to any tag and/or see the properties of any tag.
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The ability to integrate the Windward Engine into Google’s cloud computing platform for developing and hosting web applications dubbed Google Applications Engine (GAE).
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This new integration will allow for processing of complex scripts and bi-directional text such as Arabic. Your PDF output will be much tighter and more closely match your template, and we’ll be able to respond rapidly to PDF requests and fixes.
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Includes support for new ForEach and slide break handling, table header row repeat across slide breaks, and native Microsoft support for charts and images.
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Tags are color coded in the template by type, making it easy to visually identify them.
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Version 13’s core code has been reworked and optimized to offer a reduced memory footprint, faster PDF generation and full documentation of supported features and limitations in the specifications for DOCX, XLSX and PPTX.
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Documents can include advanced Word image properties such as shadows, borders, and styles.
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Windward has updated HTML output to reflect changing HTML standards.
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Windward now works with a slew of new datasources: MongoDB, JSON, Cassandra, OData, Salesforce.com
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The Generate Code tool in the designer allows you to open an existing template and, with a click of a button, automatically create a window with the code needed to run your current template with all data sources and variables. Simply copy this code and paste into your application's code in the appropriate place. You now have Windward integrated into your application.
You only need to do this once. You do not do this for each template. Instead, where it has explicit files for the template and output, change that to parameters you pass to this code. Same for the parameters passed to Windward. This example uses explicit values to show you what to substitute in where.
Any pivot tables in an XLSX template are carried over to the XLSX output. The ranges in the pivot ranges are adjusted to match the generated output. So your final XLSX will have pivot tables set as expected in the generated file.
This makes creating an XLSX workbook with pivot tables trivial.
In an imported sub-template, if its properties for a style (ex. Normal) differ from the parent template's properties for the style, the use in the sub-template can be set to either use the properties in the sub-template, or the properties in the parent.
You set to retain when you don't want the child template's styling to change when imported. You set to use the parent when you want the styling of the imported template to match the styling in the parent.
Any explicit styling is always retained. This only impacts styling set by styles.
Tags can be placed in text boxes. Including linked text boxes. This gives you the ability to set the text in a textbox from your data.
Tags can be placed in shapes & smart art. This gives you the ability to set the text in a shape from your data.
When generating HTML output, the engine can either write bitmaps as distinct files the generate HTML references, or it can embed the images in the HTML providing a single file for the output.
You can place tags in pretty much any part of a template, including in footnotes & endnotes.
Any parts of a DOCX or XLSX (PowerPoint does not support this) file that are locked in the template, will be locked the same in the output.
If a font used in the template does not exist on the server generating a report, the font to substitute can be specified.
In addition, if a glyph to be rendered does not exist in the font specified, you can specify the replacement font. This can be set distinctly for European, Bi-Directional, and Far East fonts.
If you need this - it's essential. And if you don't need it, it's irrelevant.
Windward enables you to build a document by applying multiple datasources to the template simultaneously. When Windward is merging the data into a template, it processes the template by handling each tag in order, and each tag pulls from different datasources. (As opposed to processing all of one datasource, then processing the next.)
This allows the select tag to use data from another datasource in its select. For example, if you are pulling customer information from one data source, you can then pull data from the sales datasource using the customer ID of the customer presently processing to pull the sales information for that customer. If you're interested in patching together your data from multiple datasources, read this post on our blog.
