Finally my blog readers get to read a post on my blog. For people wondering where I've been all this time, I have no answer except for the fact that I've been too busy with college. Hopefully this long post marks the start of frequent posting on my blog.

Noesis 2009 was organized by Vision, the technical society of MANIT Bhopal on 5th and 6th September 2009. It was a two day inter-college mega event. The event consisted of different events addressing different faces of technology. Every department had its own events. The events were-

1.Crime Scene Investigation (General Event)
2.Chem-Zone (Chemical Event)
3.Contrivance (Civil Event)
4.Cryptex and Codecraft (CS and IT event)
5.Didactronics (ECE Event)
6.Ecotecture (Energy Event)
7.Genestein (Bio Informatics Event)
8.Mechatreak (Mechanical Event)
9.Tatva Bodh (MSME Event)
10.Trical Bykes (Electrical and Energy Event)
11.Sci-Tech Quiz
12.War-Zone (Gaming Event)

The events I, being an IT student and a programmer by, was bothered about were CSI, Cryptex and Codecraft. Codecraft was an online submission event. There were around 15 programs to be submitted and I didn't notice the deadline on time so I didn't bother submitting the questions. Anant Khaitan (aka GNUger), 3rd year IT bagged the first place in Codecraft. My team managed to get a 2nd place in Cryptex, read on to know the full story.

Here's a description of Noesis 09 from my perspective-
Noesis was a team participation event. Each team comprised of 3 people and registration fees was Rs 200 per team. I chose two of my good friends and classmates Shilpesh Mishra and Nishant Maloo as my teammates. I, for some reason, had decided that I wasn't going to look for a winning combination while selecting my teammates so I chose my friends over anyone who could add better value to the team.

Day 1: I reached the registration desk on time and there were loads of people who reached there according to Indian Stretchable Time. The event was bound to get delayed by a couple of hours and it did happen. The day started with a short opening ceremony in the SAC. It was shortly followed by the first event, CSI.

Crime Scene Investigation was an interesting concept, a fun event but I feel it the alloted time wasn't enough and my team didn't feel like using our brains early in the morning over solving a murder mystery. I and Shilpesh didn't take CSI seriously at all. Nishant was comparatively a bit involved in the event. We used the CSI time to have our lunch and gear up for Cryptex which was supposed to be held after lunch at 2:00 PM.

Now it was time for the most important event of Noesis, Cryptex. Cryptex was an event that was designed to test participants in every domain of the CS-IT field. On Day 1, the preliminary rounds of Cryptex were conducted in the SAC. There were 3 rounds on Day 1 of Cryptex. The first round was Techno-tale which was a Cryptography related event. It had a tech crossword and decoding questions too. People in general found round 1 a bit tough and I guess the scores would've been pretty close in the round. Round Two was Iconizer which was about identifying logos, tag-lines, pictures. It was extremely easy and the toughest it got was the logo of Debian. I managed to get a great score in that round. Round Three was Conundrums. It was a 75 question quiz that had 70 MCQs and 5 subjective questions related to programming in C, C++, Java and there were questions related to UNIX and Linux. This was supposed to be done in 30 minutes. I manged to do pretty well in this round too. A good question I can recall is

Write a Hello World program without using semicolon

At the end of the 3rd round, we were told that the top 30% teams would qualify for the Second Round of Cryptex. After the preliminary rounds of Cryptex, there was a performance by the college band Paradox and dance performances by the members of the society Roobaroo. It was followed by a Teacher's Day special event for the teachers. That was all for Day 1 of Noesis. By the end of the day, I was confident of qualifying for the second round and my teammates were more confident than I was .

Day 2: The first thing we did on day to was to confirm that we had qualified for further rounds. 30 teams had qualified and my team was one of them. For the rest of the teams, an auxiliary event was conducted through which 2 teams were given Wild Card entry to the Grand Finale.

The day 2 main event was Codex. It was a 90 minutes long event completely based on coding. The paper had three sections, the first one had MCQs and objective questions based on coding. A really nice question I remember and could solve was-

Write a fast way to multiply a number by 7 without using * and any loops

There were other output questions including tricky ones like one on the Lexical convention. Section 2 consisted of two programs that were not too tough but not too simple either. Section 3 was a cryptography section that had a long program that was supposed to be understood and we needed to find the input for which the given output would be generated. It was a nice section and I managed to do that one easily. After Codex, the top 5 were supposed to be selected from the 30 shortlisted teams. I had just a slight hope of making it to the Finals. The result of Codex was out at around 1:30 PM and my team had made it to the Finals.

Now it was time for Seven teams to battle it out in the finals of Cryptex at 2:00 PM. The Finale had 2 parts-Testing and Programming and Hardware Trivia. Testing and Programming had 9 questions- 7 questions were testing questions in which we had to check the conditions where the given code would run abnormally or would not perform the desired operation. There were 2 programming questions which were not too tough. The total time alloted for the Finale was 2 hours. Hardware Testing was an interview type round. Teams were called one by one and asked to identify the different parts of a Motherboard. Hardware Trivia was very simple and my team did pretty well.

I attempted almost all questions in the Grand Finale but for some reason, I felt that we weren't going to get a podium finish. I had a word with other participants but none of them seemed to be confident except for GNUger and his team which everyone predicted would grab the first place. All I had in mind was that I was going to get a certificate for being a finalist. I was having an ice-cream with a friend when the results were announced and I was shocked to hear that my team bagged the second place. That was followed by a very excited me jumping around in public to meet my teammates and celebrate. The third position was bagged by another team from my class- Ayush Agrawal, Prateek Gupta and Amit Gupta. I was considering those guys to be good competition and they didn't disappoint me. Congrats guys, you did a good job .

Then I went to the SAC and saw the finals of the Sci-Tech quiz and a play on Sherlock Holmes waiting for the prize distribution. Finally when it was time for the prize distribution ceremony. My team got a cash prize of Rs 600, two free courses on Ethical Hacking by HCL CDC and a 20% discount coupon on CCNA/Linux by HCL CDC.

Noesis ended up to be a big success in all terms. The participation was high, the events were really good, it was well organized, I had lots of fun and last but not the least, the prizes were nice. In short, I had a great weekend and the credit goes to Noesis.