Tuesday was the day the backlog ran out. I started it four days behind the release and ended it caught up, with Day 13 played as a full dress rehearsal at nine at night. Five event days, 138 commits, 415 CORRECT verdicts, and the best board night we had all week.
One download in 741
The Day 9 timed runs went out just after midnight, and every one of the five Masteries landed on its first attempt. Four first places came out of that batch: Escape Room and All the World’s a Stager on the Time Trial, Built Different on the Mastery, and Trust Everyone on the Time Trial.
One run did not make it. Nimble, the Nim binary, ships a 31.6 MB evidence file, and on one Time Trial that download took 15.0 seconds. Every other copy of that file came down in about a second. Out of 741 downloads we had recorded, exactly one stalled, and of course it was under a clock.
Day 10: hands off
At 09:51 the robot started Day 10, and at 10:19 the last Mastery came back CORRECT. About 28 minutes from triage to finish, and I did not touch it once. Two of the five lanes missed on their first try (one metadata field the engine had never seen, one binary answer out of a hundred), and both got fixed offline in about 20 minutes while the other lanes kept going.
Day 11 took about 70 minutes, and it brought the line I am proudest of from the whole week.
“It’s perception”
D-Day, the Day 11 binary, written in the D language, had a Time Trial pool of exactly one attempt. One. The Mastery asked about things a single Time Trial could never show us, so the robot decided the Mastery was unreachable and built a special override for it.
I stopped that. What I told it:
“There should be no such thing as an unreachable Mastery. It’s perception, and it’s just that the pool of TT was small.”
That rule has been in place ever since, and no lane has sat parked on a technicality again.
The goal changes
Day 12 was strange. Every pool in every lane was a single attempt, and the boards stayed blank for everyone, so there was nothing to chase. It did give me a quiet evening to think about what actually decides this event.
Here it is. Every team that solves everything ends up with the same points. So the tiebreaker is time: whoever banks the last flag on Day 31 first, wins. At 20:42 I set the goal in writing: Day 31 start-to-finish time. And I turned on a timer: from Day 14 on, the robot plays every release live at 09:00 by itself, as a dress rehearsal for the last day.
Day 13 at nine at night
At 21:00 the robot played Day 13 start to finish as a rehearsal. It took 65 minutes and 23 seconds and all 15 checks came back CORRECT. It was not clean, but it had highlights. On the binary, Crystal Clear, we took first place on both boards: 0.155 seconds on the Time Trial and 0.224 on the Mastery.
Opposite Day, the warmups, had a title that was a hint: “A met Z” is Atbash, the cipher that mirrors the alphabet. The Mastery cut the answer into pieces, one reversed and one Atbashed, and the engine had only ever tried Atbash on whole words. The first attempt got 0 of 63. The second went through.
When I pasted the Day 13 boards that night, the robot was first on 8 of 10. A couple of speed reruns just after midnight made it 9.
Three days earlier I was dead last on every board I touched. Tuesday night, the backlog was gone and the robot was ready to play a release for real.