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    Spring 1992 IEEE CS Texas Statewide Programming Contest Announcement:
    (Important information inside if you are already planning to compete)

Interested in competing?

            (This contest is for university students only.)

  Out-of-stater?  Well, if you can get to Austin this Saturday, you're
invited!  The entry fee is a whopping $5, and it's being held in the
Engineering Science (ENS) building 3rd-floor PC lab on the UT campus.

  We are still looking for teams to enter the Spring 1992 contest being held
THIS Saturday, April 11.  If you are interested in competing, please write to
unbelver@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu as soon as possible.  You must enter a team, so
look for one or two teammates.  We have a few teams from Rice, Texas A&M,
UT, Baylor, and UT San Antonio, but we have room for more!

  There are some really good prizes this year as we have generous sponsorship
from Dell, MKS, IBM, Quarterdeck, MacProducts, and Mix Software, so don't miss
your chance!

  The contest will be conducted in C++ on Dell 386 and Intel 486 machines.
Don't worry about the C++ stuff- if you know C, you should do just fine.
We've tried to make the interface simple, and we'll have people there to
help you with questions.

  Not only all this cool stuff, but there are most hip t-shirts for
contestants, a blow-your-mind demo of OS/2 2.0, and scrumdilicious pizza!

Already planning to compete?

  As we have every year, we are announcing the general format of the game a
little early so you can think about the algorithms you are going to use.
Please do not bring any code with you to the contest, but use this opportunity
to study algorithms and strategies you think might be useful.

Here's the game format!

  The game is called Spiders.  You are a spider and although your sight isn't
so hot (8 useless eyes), you could feel a feather land in your web if it were
20 feet away!  Your mission: Eat flies!  Of course, you're not going to catch
flies unless you spin a web.  Even if a fly does land in your web, you better
have a fast way to get there, because there are other spiders in the game, and
they're out to get the flies, too.  More details on the contest day, but as
always, be prepared for anything!  Hint: Ever been bitten by a spider?  They
sure have *sharp* little mandibles!  Another Hint: Web is web.

  Your player will be a C(++) program which communicates with the game server
under the multitasking environment of JEMM.  Your process will be given a
specific timeslice so that your it cannot have more CPU time than your
opponent's.  So it is important that you write efficient code.  If the server
does not hear from your process for a turn, it will go on without you and
assume you're sleeping or thinking.  Most of this multi-tasking business should
be transparent to your player, and your process will not be aware that it's
being task-switched.

About Spiders.

  This color VGA (640x480) game will probably not run with less than
2Mb on a 386 or 486, depending on how many players there are.  It uses
a home-made MS DOS based multi-tasking environment called JEMM which
exploits virtual 8086 mode, written by Jason Yenawine, and features
majorly hip animation thanks to the artwork of Oliver Yu.  It has also
been written to be portable to UNIX (X11 w/ BSD sockets required),
thanks to a brilliantly new patented style of programming by Rob Gowin
rumored to be called "PC's-Suck-But-They're-Everywhere Coding." Carlos
Villalpando and Yulia Gelfond are responsible for the
It's-a-C++-but-don't-worry-about-it interface.  Some obscene number of
man-hours went into this game which could probably be indirectly
measured by the inverse of the semester GPA's of the programmers, so be
nice to 'em; they've had an interesting six months.

Disclaimer.

  The guy writing this had nothing to do with the incredible work done on
this contest, so don't ask me real specific questions, 'cause I'll prolly
make up something, and it'll prolly be wrong.

        =-ddt->

PS.  Don't respond to me- write to unbelver@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu or call
     (512) 471-5038, the UT IEEE CS office!
-- 

: "Alone or in pairs, rolls down the stairs, rolls over the neighbor's dog.  :
:    What's good as a snack, and fits on your back? It's Log, Log, Log!      :
:      It's Looo-og, It's Looo-og, it's big, it's heavy, it's wood!          :
:       It's Looo-og, It's Looo-og, it better than bad- it's good!"          :