There is no Ruby. Ruby is a lie.

What are CSGames:

The Computer Science Games is an annual event for undergraduate student teams from across North America. Challenges in science and engineering, computing, IT and video games entirely prepared by students are presented each year. http://csgames.org

The CSGames is a event in which students from computer-related fields meet to compete in various challenges and ingest inhuman quantities of alcohol and coffee/RedBull over the course of a weekend (friday night to sunday night). The CSGames 2011 event was the 10th edition of the event.

The events, the competition, the other teams were pure awesomeness. The larger part of our team will graduate before the next games and will unfortunately not be elligible.

Our Team

After 9 years, only one Montreal university had not partaken in the CSGames: UQAM. This year, we did. Our team was lead by Thierry and was composed of:

• Thierry Joyal (@thierryjoyal)
• Jodi Giordano (@ephemeregames)
• Guillaume Malette (@gmalette)
• Christian Blais (@christianblais)
• Nilovna Bascunan-Vasquez (@nilovna)
• Julien Theron
• Justin Michaud-Ouellette (@akachaki)
• Francois Pomerleau

The Challenges

You can see the the schedule on the website. The different competitions include coding, algorithms, analysis, AI, gaming and sports. During the competitions, you are bound to the computers provided and do not have access to the internet or any resource not explicitly provided. The documentation was unusable because it linked to MSDN or Sun, which are unaccessible. Also, the website states that a UNIX environment is used, but it was mostly Windows.

What to expect

As previously stated, this year was UQAM's first participation, and none of us knew what to expect. The only other competition in which we had participated was the Coveo Blitz. This time, things were different.

The first encounter we had with the group was during the roll call on friday night. Other teams definitely had more experience than we did. Everyone was singing/yelling the school hymn when it's name came up. At that point we realized that no one knew UQAM's hymn. Expect a lot of dirty, funny songs.

The Concordia students / CSGames staff did a pretty good job in organizing the events and ensuring that the schedule was met. However, if an event is scheduled for 14h00, people will get there at 14h00, at which point the staff will realize that there aren't enough computers for everyone and groups will be redistributed to other rooms. You can expect the challenge to start at 14h30.

For every challenge, we were handed a challenge statement explaining the tasks and the points awarded for each. The language specified always included C# and Java, sometimes C++, Python or Ruby. Ruby is a lie. The sample code in Python doesn't work, and the APIs are undocumented. In short, you'll be using Java or C#, two languages that I consider congenital cousins. That sucked. Hard. Expect Java.

As far as meals go, it was fairly predictable. It always got there one hour after schedule, and the wait was always long because the queue wasn't parallelized. On the first night a few teams ended up at McDonald's after waiting for two hours. Expect your meals one hour late.

What else

The competition I liked the most was PuzzleHero. First, it wasn't in Java. Second, they were very challenging, and third, you could use the language of your choice with the tools you liked (Ruby or Python, I said it!).

Be prepared

• Learn your school's hymn
• Get friendly with Java (if that's even possible)
• Download and learn a HEX editor
• Learn a scripting language
• There is no Ruby

In short

Get your school to go. Get your team ready. Be prepared! You'll meet a ton of interesting people, be forced outside your comfort zone, and melt your brain.