The Unpublished Stories: The Two Nights in which I Saw the Sun Rose (Deep)

Hi readers! I finally have some free-ish time, and I've been planning to write a mid-year reflection (and probably birthday reflection too). However, I'm not really in the mood to write right now, and from past experiences, forcing myself to write when I'm not in the mood either resulted in sub-par posts, or just ended up as draft permanently. So, I decided to look through my old drafts and try to publish them even though they are not really in the best shape to be seen by public.

This might be annoying to some readers who wish for continuity in my posts but unfortunately, I can't find a way to edit the date of a post, so you really just have to live with it. (Actually I didn't even try and too lazy to do that so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

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Sometime in September/October 2013, based on the link embedded in the story.
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Hi readers!! Finally I am able to make time to write another post here. Just for the sake of records, you know. You can't have a good record with too many long hiatuses (hiati? plural form of hiatus, anyone?), you know haha.

Maybe I should start with how I am doing so far. So far, awesome! Well, my awesome is not really the same as your awesome, I guess, if what you mean by awesome is going to party on weekends and stuff. In fact, I have not left campus for quite a while. (By I mean quite a while is a few weeks) Many people would say that I do not have a life. However, I think I am doing just fine. 

I have spent a total of two nights not sleeping. Not because of insomnia, because I want to. The first night was because of this tournament called A.I.ttakatta. It is basically a tournament where participants have to create an AI for a game that you may know. I am too lazy to describe it here (would be rather long and not intuitive anyway) you can just see it here. (Sorry I think they don't have the game running anymore, the closest thing to this game that I know would be the game "Sperm Wars" on iPhone. Go download it and see it for yourself) Shortly, I was helping my friend creating a really complex AI for this competition. There were three of us, and I only joined the team after they have finished discussing the strategies so I was basically just like a hired programmer. However, due to my little experience in programming, even a small part of the AI system they have designed took me quite a while. What's more, our style of coding was different and thus I needed to modify my codes to accommodate his coding style which was in my opinion rather... old hahaha. You can ask me in the comments or something if you are a programmer and want to know what I mean by that; I do not want to confuse other readers who I believe, are mostly not familiar with programming.

Anyway, we coded the whole night, like literally. We finished at about 7.30 (in the morning) if I am not wrong, and tested the code in the sandbox (sorry for the computing jargon. It basically means an environment in which you can test your codes for errors) provided. The alliance was rather short-lived as I could not come into agreement in the coding style with the rest, and I parted with them. After that, I was supposed to revise for my mid-terms (it was during the recess week before mid-term week), but my brain was just filled with so many strategies that I would have implemented if I would code the AI myself. Unable to resist the urge, I made one myself and submitted it. The result was not bad, though I did not win anything. On the other hand, the other two also parted ways for reason unknown to me, yet the guy who initiated the alliance in the first place end up came in the third place on the competition. 

Just a little note, the guy I mention above is NOT the name of the guy in the third place of the tournament you see in the link provided above. It was because the tournament was only open to NUS students, and he is not, so he borrowed his friend's ID. Anonymity preserved! =D

The other night was just last night.

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It's anyone's guess what happened on the other night I didn't get any sleep. It might be about the time when I needed to finish working on a "sumobot" AI (just google it if you want to know what it is), which is actually a project for my programming 101 class in NUS. That was some fun stuff too. Damn, I miss university life...

All the best in your future endeavours!