CS and the City

Two weeks ago, my friend Jarrett and I participated in the "A.I. Battle" put on by the University of Waterloo's IEEE group and sponsored by Microsoft. Most of the programming competitions hosted by the university are usually algorithm-based and solo, so the change of pace of the 'battle' was very well received and ended up attracting a ton of participants.

The competition consisted of a set of standardized game logic and a basic player class that each team had to extend in order to build their player. The goal of the game was to create a contiguous path from on side of the board to the other (top to bottom or left to right), while the other player tried to do the same. A pattern of squares on the board is already allocated to each player such that it advantageous for the first player to attempt to create the path vertically and the second player to attempt to create the path horizontally [IEEE contest page].

Our bot "Zaphod" was basic in the sense that it did not try to pick blocks with the intent to block the other player. Instead, we worked on creating a dynamic path-finding algorithm that would judge the advantage of picking each square that it possibly could and then choose the one that gets us closer to our goal. This made it relatively resiliant to attacks as it tended to walk around most blocking attempts [more about our development process].

Yesterday, the IEEE group announced the winners and our bot Zaphod placed fifth out of 44 entires. Only 9 points behind the winning bot. That makes Jarrett and I the proud recipients of one of the five prize packages (though we just get which ever package is left, ebay here I come) and our names forwarded off to the Microsoft recruiter for possible co-op terms. Hopefully they won't be too turned off by our poorly documented code. A big thanks to the guys in the IEEE group for putting on the competition, I'd really like to see this become a common thing.

I have a supervisor from a previous co-op emailing me to let me know that he is now working for a startup and that they are interested in getting me to help do some development part time, with the option of a full-time position in an upcoming workterm.

At the very least, the offer is quite the compliment. Though I have been working with Java since first year in Waterloo, this particular job was my very first workterm developing 'professionally' with Java. I felt confident that I was able to make the leap from academic to real-world during the workterm, but I'm glad to hear that my employer felt the same way. In fact, he was impressed enough to do a bit of a sell towards the end of the email. The more I look over his 'Why?'s, however, the interested I become.

• Money – It's nice, but I'm increasingly finding that my time is much more valuable. Plus, it's a startup, the amount and frequency could be spotty.
• Resume Fodder – Yes, another development position on the ol' resume is good, but how does the addition of this position to my resume make me look to an employer. More may not necessarily be better in the case. If I took the position, I would be doing part-time development in my free time from my full-time job. A prospective employer may get the feeling that I don't actually commit myself to my job if I'm also working for some other company in the evenings.
• Fancy Job Title – If I accept a fulltime position for an upcoming workterm (which would be September to December 2005 at the earliest) in addition to my role as a developer, I would also be put in charge of any co-op initiative, a relatively ceramonial positon. A large number of co-op employers take advantage of current co-ops to hire the next term's group.

I've been saying that I am really interested in working for a startup, but I think my expectations may not actually be representative of what's out there. Then again, it may be that it's the ideas that startups pursue that interest me and I don't find the idea of this specific startup that magnetizing. Are co-ops in a position to negotiate terms of employment with startups?