KnowBots

After a long time I did a night out at office. The work was not the usual project work. It was a inventive work. Work on AI! Yes, Artificial Intelligence in combination with Business Intelligence. The occasion was a code competition. There were 17 teams and we are in the top 5. The top 3 will be rewarded. But to know if we the "KNOWBOTS" are in the top 3, we would have to wait till evening. A real anxious wait.
Now the details…
Friday afternoon we started the installation of some new tools. As expected we faced lots of problems and the problems just increased as there was no expertise on the tools in India. ISD calls to Germany dint give any positive results. Google was of no use. Hopes were started fading as the daylight started to fade. By 9pm, it was decided to scrap the original concept and work on a alternative. A couple of us continued to work on the problems. Finally we decided to call our American office which developed the tool. I used crib about the time difference. For the first time the time difference turned out to be an advantage. 30 mins of net meeting and phone call solved all our problems and our project was back on track. Satisfied with the work we took a fag break and watched some juicy scenes from the Hindi movie Girlfriends. Welcomes break indeed ;-).
Morning was again tense as we started integrating the modules. It was smooth. By 1 in the afternoon, the atmosphere was cool in the prj team. At 5 the demo was to happen in front of a highly knowledgeable panel of judges. At 4:45 Murphy's Law took over. Reports failed to come up. A last minute code change was the culprit. At 4:50 we get a call that the presentation has been postponed to 6:45 as one of the judges could not turn up. We just couldn’t help believing in LUCK. By 6 everything was up again. The demo went smooth and the by the time the results were told at 10:30 in the night half the team was in bed in some part of Bangalore. SMSs flew around in jubilation. Today we need to demo again in front of the whole company.
Waiting for the final outcome.