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.
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 20th of September. Further problems will be put up soon. (Total of 4-5 problems).
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.
Please visit the Shaastra Helpdesk for any queries.