Prometheus

Prometheus, one of the biggest and most awaited fests of MIT after Revels & Tech-Tatva flagged off its fifth edition on April 1^st at exactly 00:00 hrs. HawkEye, an online scavenger hunt, and Online Coding, a competitive coding contest, made the night-owls scratch their brains past midnight as they crossed different levels and challenges.

Hawkeye is a three-day online event which started with an April Fools’ Day special precursor called Cybercow where the participants were supposed to answer random questions. The actual event which began a few hours before dawn comprised of a series of questions which gradually unfolded into the story of the hawk.

Online Coding went live at midnight on Hackerrank where the participants were to solve challenges prepared by an online judge. The event attracted several skillful competitive coders.

Bamboozled

What gets wetter and wetter as it dries? Where will the passengers be buried if an aeroplane crashes in Mexico?

These are the type of stupefying questions asked to the 70 teams that participated in the Round 1 of Bamboozled, the fun game show of Prometheus. And while you may be thinking that one could think precisely and answer them, random loud music playing in the speakers and random videos on projector took care of that. The event aimed at solving puzzles as quickly as possible without being distracted. The questions about Aptitude, Obtuse Logic and General Ignorance challenged the wits of the participants, making them wonder over the amusing riddles. The crazy marking scheme too made the quiz all the more interesting.

–Ayush Agrawal

Dawn of Justice

A unique event which mixed the powers of our favourite superheroes into the programming questions, the first round of Dawn of Justice witnessed around 40 teams putting their coding skills to work in order to be in the top 8 teams for the final round. The eco-friendly question booklet was not on paper, but was distributed as a laptop application. The fascinating superhero-themed questions, based on C, C++ & Java, had an interesting feature – if you answer consecutive questions correctly, you’ll be blessed with a superpower which you can use against your opponents in the final round of the event.

Wolverine had the amazing power of regeneration, so the team could get more than three attempts to solve a particular question. Flash could increase the time required. This was probably one of the most interesting events of Prometheus.

–Ayush Agrawal & Nabilah Husain

Paper Presentation

“Necessity is the mother of all inventions” is a saying which has definitely stood the test of time. The world is perhaps at the helm of a “digital era”, and the remaining bit will be achieved in no time, owing to the present speed and ferocity of scientific development.

Keeping the budding innovators of MIT in mind, Prometheus V held its event ‘Paper Presentation’ on 2 April 2016, wherein, students were provided with a platform to unveil their technical papers, ideas, and discuss it with fellow students and judges.

The event mandated the participants to present their ideas within a time frame of 10 minutes, followed by a 5 minutes Q&A session with the judges and other participants. The event saw presentations on a plethora of different topics such as ‘Survey on Risk Detection and Evaluation of Forum Posts on Social Media’, ‘Multiple Data Compression and Encryption Using Iterative Techniques’, ‘Image Encryption’, ‘Automated Features and Extraction of Retinal Images’, ‘Cryptography Based on Prime Numbers’ and many more.

The judges for the event were Dr. Prema KV and Ajitha Shenoy KB. The event ended with a speech by both the judges. They were surprised by the amount of innovative zeal prevailing among the students, and encouraged their endeavors. They further gave students tips on improving their projects, and wished them luck for the future.

-Diptark Bose

Artem

The design segment of Prometheus aimed at testing one’s graphic design skills through a twisted approach. The preliminary round required the participants to recreate a design projected, modifying it as per the themes given. A lot of creativity was displayed by the participants working on Photoshop/Illustrator with gusto. The final round of the event had six participants, half of them members from IECSE. This round’s theme was to produce a hybridized design of a cartoon character & a superhero. But wait, there was a snag! Every tool of Photoshop/Illustrator came at a price. The participants were given equals points as currency to buy the tools they need in Photoshop/Illustrator and were allowed to use only those tools to design the whole thing. Obviously, the pen tool was sold out! At the end of two hours came some of the most amazing design outcomes ever witnessed. Mario + Wolverine, Batman + Minion, Doremon + Ironman. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.

–Ayush Agrawal

Port:80

Port:80 was an event challenging all the web developers in Manipal. The initial round was a written quiz about web-dev basics i.e. HTML, CSS, JavaScript. Some questions were easy enough to answer blindly, while others required a good understanding of the basic terminology. The final round had four teams struggling through the given task which was about developing a form supported by database queries and PHP statements at the back-end. The participants were allowed to submit their work after two hours, during which they were allowed to use the internet for reference. Though an optional task, extra marks were awarded for building the front-end of the webpage. The task was somewhat tough to complete single-handedly in the given time, but the participants gave in their best efforts to present as much as their geek-brains could yield.

–Ayush Agrawal