Wednesday morning was the first real one. No backlog, no rehearsal. Day 14 released at 09:00, the timer had fired at 08:55, and the robot was already sitting at the starting line when the challenges appeared.
I was proud of it for about eleven minutes.
The run
Every Day 14 route had a pool of one: one Time Trial attempt, one Mastery attempt, 30 seconds on the clock, no second chances. The Single Solves went like this:
- Warmups, Seven Steps. 3.0 seconds, first try.
- Script, Trust the Process. 971 of 971 answers on the first try, 7.5 seconds after release.
- Mobile, Predictable Crypto. 5.4 seconds.
- Binary, Selective Memory. 140 of 140 on the first try, 14.4 seconds.
- Metadata, The Shortcut Home. About five minutes. A Windows shortcut file stores its target three separate ways, and they can disagree. We had never read one before, so the reader got written on the spot.
Four lanes were CORRECT by 09:00:30. The last flag landed at 09:11:00. Ten minutes and forty-four seconds after release.
Seven Steps
The one real miss was the warmups Mastery. Each blob ended with a little piece of the answer shifted seven letters along the alphabet (a Caesar shift by seven) and written with no spaces. The robot’s Caesar step only fired on text that had spaces and real words in it, so it never even looked at the piece. With a pool of one, there was no Time Trial to show us that shape first. The ranked Mastery came back incorrect.
35th
That was the morning I learned where we actually stood. I came out of Day 14 in 35th place. And the team in first had finished every challenge, all 15 checks, inside the first minute of the release.
Ten minutes and forty-four seconds against under a minute. That is not a tuning problem. That is a different shape of machine.
So I wrote down what I wanted, in plain words:
“We need to adjust in order to make ourselves faster to the finish line, it’s what will decide the entire competition on the 31.”
And then the line that became the target for everything after:
“If no model had been in the path, 9:01 is possible: this is what we’re striving for.”
The race, built by lunch
The robot came back with a plan for that different machine. My answer: “I like your plan, all of it. Let’s do it.” It went in at 10:32, about an hour and a half after the run that inspired it, and it was reviewed and rehearsed before lunch was over.
I went to bed in 35th. I was not worried about it. I had a machine that could not have finished in under a minute that morning, and a different machine by dinner.