KOM CLOUDSERVICE
All entries · Day 17

First place, at the time

Saturday: four lanes done in 33 seconds, one binary question no file could answer, about 250 wrong guesses before the grader said yes, first place on the day anyway, and five new board firsts that night.

By Wizdumb

Before I went to bed on Friday night I changed how I wanted the robot to think about every run from here on. There is no such thing as a wasted run any more. The only thing that counts is the time from release to all 15 checks CORRECT.

The good part

Four lanes were done in 33 seconds:

  • Script, Fetch Quest: 13.7 seconds. 1,139 of 1,139 on the first try, five seconds in, with no new code at all.
  • Mobile, Name Collapse: 25.7 seconds. A new encoding where each piece of data says which position it goes to. There was no reader for it, so one got written live, and the lane finished 18.7 seconds after release.
  • Metadata, Hear Me Out: 30.7 seconds. A WAV audio file this time, a format the engine had never read. The question wanted the audio codec name, which lives in a small chunk in the file’s header.
  • Warmups, Bacon Bits: 32.7 seconds. A Baconian cipher, a two-letter alphabet where each group of five letters is a small binary number, stacked over hex. My Day 16 notes had predicted exactly this kind of alphabet would show up. We just had not built it yet.

Three of those four lanes needed brand new code, and all three had it in about 20 seconds each.

The bad part

The binary lane, Decoder Ring (the robot knew it as Encoded Configuration Recovery), banked 193 of its 204 answers on the first try, 7.6 seconds in. Then it hit a question called hcfg_storage, which asked for an “exact artifact-derived value” describing how the config blob was stored.

No file in the challenge held that value. Not one. We read every byte and found nothing to derive it from. So the robot did the only thing left: it guessed wordings and let the grader judge. About 250 wrong answers later, between 6.7 seconds and 532.7 seconds after release, it found the two the grader wanted: raw_const_array and raw_hcfg_section.

The Mastery itself was the best part of the lane. It carried five 32 MB deliveries and answered 1,014 of its 1,020 questions on the first pass. The last six were section-name formats that no Time Trial had shown. One ranked attempt, about 93 seconds from start to CORRECT.

Last check: 675.2 seconds. Four lanes in 33 seconds, and one lane twenty times slower than the next.

First place, at the time

And here is the thing. When I checked the standings after the run, we were in first place at the time. I do not think we were the only team that ran into that question.

That afternoon Huntress reissued the challenge. The hcfg_storage question became a fixed set of choices with published rules for picking one. The robot ran six training Time Trials on the new version: every one CORRECT on the first round, zero rejections.

Guessing is not the first choice

That question started the most useful argument I had with the robot all week.

My first reaction: guessing is not the first choice. Read the file first. If the file genuinely cannot hold the answer, that is probably a bug in the challenge, and the robot should say so instead of quietly learning a vocabulary of random words.

By the evening I had thought about what that means under a race clock, and I turned it around:

“I want it to guess and not just stop and notify”

So both halves stand. Derive from the file first. When the file cannot hold the answer, say so, and then guess as wide as it takes.

The speed round

With all 15 checks banked, Saturday evening was the first speed round: go back to boards where we could still gain and run them again. The Hall of Fame keeps your best time, so a rerun can only help. About 33 ranked runs, every single one CORRECT on its first round. The new first places:

  • Native Library Secrets (Day 15 mobile): 1st on the Time Trial at 0.262 seconds, and 1st on the Mastery at 0.357.
  • Crumb Trail (Day 15 script): 1st on the Time Trial and the Mastery.
  • JNI Boundary (Day 16 mobile): 1st on the Time Trial at 0.312 seconds, up from 6th.
  • Decoder Ring, the Day 17 binary with the broken question: 1st on the Time Trial at 1.539 seconds, up from 7th.

Across all 170 board slots so far, the robot holds 28 first places, 22 seconds and 21 thirds.

Getting ready for the web

Day 19 brings a lane nobody has seen yet: web. Files plus a live target of your own. We started getting ready for it that day.

One week ago I was 38th of 38 on a warmups board, typing answers by hand. Fourteen days to go.