Applied Engineering

Simulation Championship

A champion (from the late Latin campio) is one who is dazzlingly skilled in any field, one who relentlessly fights for a cause, who gives hope to others, but keeps none for himself.

While we, here, do not ask you to sweat it out in a duel and show your brawn, we ask you to show your technical prowess in handling just a few of the myriad analytically unsolvable practical problems in the present day industrial and engineering world. The only weapon, other than your own mental faculties, that you are given is a computing machine.

The champions need to simulate the problem, creatively and intuitively, thereby, giving hope that the solution would be viable for use by real industrial practitioners. Cash prizes and internships from Qualcomm are up for grabs!

Event Format

Rules And Regulations

Challenging problems in a few specialized fields would be put up in August. Each team needs to choose at least one problem, simulate it and improvise on their method repeatedly, to get as close to the desired solution as possible. You can use any programming language like MATLAB, C, Python or Perl. We would like to emphasize that figuring out the approach and the algorithm for the best solution is more important than elegance in using the programming language.

In a preliminary round of selection, the entries will be evaluated based on the approach to the problem and the progress made. You will have to mail us your simulation programs with a write-up on how it achieves the required objective and a few sample outputs which clarify the working of the code. Choose sample inputs in such a way that the code gets into the various situations the real entity it models might get into. The deadline for the preliminary round of selection is 22nd of September.

Teams submitting entries must also include all details of team members like name, age, college, college id, branch, email id, and phone number. Kindly indicate if you require accommodation during Shaastra before the event.

The teams selected for the final rounds would be required to present their work during Shaastra before a panel of judges and also demonstrate their working code. A logical explanation or a proof indicating the closeness of the solution obtained to the optimal solution would be appreciated. The evaluation will be done based on how close your simulation is to reality and the assumptions that you make to solve the problem. Solutions to the problems would be separately judged and a winner would be chosen for each.

The teams have to mail their solutions to simchamp@shaastra.org

There can be a maximum of 3 members in a team.
A team can submit entries for more than one problem, if they wish to. If they produce more than one solution to a single problem, they must clearly demonstrate or prove the advantages and disadvantages of each approach to the judges.
Please note that groups are not encouraged to engage in inter-group co-operation while solving the problems.

The most important criterion shall be the algorithm used. Teams must clearly indicate, in their report, a detailed account of how their algorithm for the simulation works. Teams are selected if there is no visible flaw in their approach and if their assumptions and approximations are acceptable.

What do I do if my simulation requires some additional packages for functioning?
If you wish to code in any other language please send us a mail citing the package and the version you are using for developing the code. Depending on the situation, we would inform you if it could be arranged.
What will be the level of difficulty?
The problems will mostly be close to real-life engineering situations and hence they will definitely require a good level of technical understanding. The code development is entirely in the hands of the developer but a fair bit of experience will be required in coding as the final code might involve a lot of tweaking and hence a well structured approach to code development will be helpful.