This article is from page 34 of the 2007-10-09 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 34 JPG
, two young students from Gort Community College are mak- ing their own mark on the computer world this week by becoming among the first teenagers in the world to take part in the Image Cup.
Finn Krewer and Michael Sell, who both won prizes at last year’s Young Scientist Competition, entered Project Hoshimi, a category of the Image Cup where students are asked to create a strategy that represents the behaviour of a team of microscopic robots – or nanobots – moving inside
a computer based world. The Image Cup is world’s premier student pro- gramming competition and, up until this year, was only open third-level computer programming students.
This year however, event organisers opened the competition to second- level students, allowing Finn and Michael the chance to compete with the elite in the programming world.
To compete in Project Hoshimi, the boys programmed virtual ‘bots’ with artificial intelligence and watch a CD engine plot the progress of their crea- tions in a nano world.
This year, event organisers decided to base the competition in a virtual
human body where the bots attempt- ed to fight illnesses and protect the body.
The competition’s first round con- sisted of a qualifier where each team had to submit a programmed strategy that reached more than 300 points. The Gort students beat this with more than 2600 points, landing straight into 251st place out of 600 qualifiers world-wide for Project Hoshimi and over 10,000 participants in the Imag- ine Cup.
In the next round, Finn and Michael beat five university-level teams to win the honour of representing their school and country in the Project
Hoshimi’s World Wide _ Battles round.
They were the youngest partici- pants to qualify their way into this section of the competition.
Unfortunately, the boys found them- selves in a very tough world-wide group and did not make it to the next level. The six top teams from this round will go to Korea to battle over 24 hours for $6000 prize money.
In addition to his achievements in the Imagine Cup, Michael Sell also received a certificate of excellence in The Young Science Writers’ Compe- tition, which was held recently by the
RDS foundation.