On Tuesday, January 24, Google Waterloo opened its doors to engineers from the Kitchener-Waterloo area to participate in the first ever Ship Wars Programming Competition. The brainchild of myself and another Waterloo engineer, Garret Kelly, Ship Wars is a competition in which participants code their own intergalactic crafts in the programming language of their choice, and then battle against each other in a virtual environment. The inaugural competition proved quite popular, drawing nearly 40 participants, ready for battle. The game itself went through a lengthy series of internal tests and refinements at the Google Waterloo office in the weeks leading up to the tournament. On the day of the event, participants quickly learned how to play and were able to code, test and enter their virtual ships into competition in under three hours. Not an easy feat! The engineers brought their own machines (mostly laptops, but a few brought in huge desktops) to build and run their ships. After a brief overview of the rules, they were able to get started coding their ships in the language of their choice—some even switched languages mid-way through the event, changing their plan of attack. They were able to control the way the ships moved (direction and speed) and the strength of their weapons, but were only given clues as to how their ship and weapon systems would behave inside the simulation— the rest had to be deduced by playing test matches against example ships. This type of on-the-fly problem solving proved to be a unique and exciting challenge. To test their ships in battle against other engineers’ creations, head-to-head battle stations were set up around the room. At these stations, participants could see how their ships were shaping up, watch them in action and ultimately decide what changes they could make before the final competition.
Local engineers design their virtual battleships

At the end of the evening, guests were given a tour of the Google Waterloo office while their ships “went to battle.” Thousands of simulated head-to-head battles and 15 minutes later, to the sound of much laughter and raucous cheering, the ship captains saw their results and watched replays of some of the most dramatic battles. Prizes (a Motorola Xoom Tablet, a Samsung Galaxy Tablet and a Google messenger bag) were awarded to the designers of the three ships with the most wins. For more photos, here’s a link to our album. This wildly successful event will be expanding out to a few other Google offices in the near future. Be on the lookout, Pittsburgh and Cambridge: Ship Wars is coming to you next!



(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)
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November 21st, 2012

Thanks for reading—please follow us on other channels

Posted by Lisa McCracken, on behalf of the Technical Programs Editorial Board

Thanks to everyone who has been a loyal reader of this blog over the last two years.

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By Anthony F. Voellm (aka Tony the @p3rfguy / G+) and Emily Bedont

On Wednesday, October 24th, while sitting under the Solar System, 30 software engineers from the Greater Seattle area came together at Google Kirkland to partake in the first ever Test Edition of Ship Wars.

September 15 marked the beginning of Hispanic Heritage Month and the start of our third year celebrating the Hispanic community through events and community outreach initiatives.

October 2nd, 2012

Michel Benard, University Relations Manager

Last week we held our fifth Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) Faculty Summit in London, bringing together 94 of EMEA’s foremost computer science academics from 65 universities representing 25 countries, together with more than 60 Googlers.

Posted by Aaron Kemp, Software Engineer

Eight months after its inception in the Google Waterloo Office, Ships Wars has reached the Silicon Valley.

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Posted by Kabita Komal and Amy Yeung, University Programs Team

This past July, our Engineering University Programs team had the pleasure of hosting a unique new organization known as Girls Who Code (GWC) in the Google New York office.

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Posted by Dan Russell, Uber Tech Lead, Search Quality & User Happiness

If you missed Power Searching with Google a few months ago or were unable to complete the course the first time around, now’s your chance to sign up again for our free online course that aims to empower our users with the tools

Posted by Peter Norvig, Director of Research

On July 26th, Google's 2012 Faculty Summit hosted computer science professors from around the world for a chance to talk and hear about some of the work done by Google and by our faculty partners. One of the sessions was a panel on Online Education.

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Posted by Andrea Held, University Relations

In the last 10 years, we’ve seen a major transition from stand-alone applications that run on desktop computers to applications running in the cloud.

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Posted by Rahul Sukthankar, Research Scientist

More than 1800 participants showed up to discuss their research at this year’s International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR’12), held in Providence, RI last month.

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Posted by Craig Rubens, People Operations Communications team

Now that Google I/O has concluded, the parachutes have been repacked, hundreds of pounds of snacks have all been eaten and the Moscone Center has fewer robots prowling its hallways.

Google I/O, our annual developer conference, begins in just two days, and this year, we’re bringing you more than 130 technical sessions, 20 code labs and 155 Sandbox partners.

Posted by Jim Keller, Software Engineer

Next week, Google will join the Internet speed community at the Velocity 2012 conference in Santa Clara, California. This will be our fifth year at the O’Reilly Velocity Web Performance and Operations Conference.

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Posted by Mark Lentczner, Software Engineer, Security Research

A number of us from Google attended this year’s IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, held May 20-23 (known as the “Oakland” conference, despite being held in San Francisco this year).

Posted by Tomer Sharon, User Experience Researcher

Students, professionals, and executives looking to stay on the bleeding edge of accessibility will be heading to Addison, Texas, from May 31 - June 2 for the annual Big Design Conference.

Posted by Kathy Baxter, Sr.

Posted by Prabhakar Raghavan, Vice President of Engineering 

More than forty members of Google’s technical staff gathered in Lyon, France in April to participate in the global dialogue around the state of the web at the World Wide Web conference (WWW) 2012.

Researchers at Google have enormous potential to impact the experience of Google users, which means it’s of enormous importance for us to conduct Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research.

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Nearly one hundred guests from the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) Boston joined Googlers for a fascinating technical talk Wednesday, March 21 at our Cambridge office.

PyCon 2012 was held in Santa Clara, which was particularly convenient for many of the dozens of participants who work at Google, whose headquarters is a few miles away in Mountain View.

Today, we're opening up registration for Google Code Jam 2012. This year thousands of students, professional programmers and freelance code wizards will pit their ingenuity against a new set of algorithmic challenges concocted by our tireless team of red-eyed, LED-illuminated problem writers.

Last month, in honor of Black History Month, Google offices in five cities in North America hosted events celebrating black professionals in our community. Across the country, we opened our doors to over 400 guests consisting of engineers, entrepreneurs, technologists, students and professors.

Cross-posted on the Google Research Blog

At the 25th Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in Granada, Spain last December, we engaged in dialogue with a diverse population of neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, statistical learning theorists, and machine learning researchers.

Google was a proud sponsor of the IxDA’s Interaction12 conference that took place in Dublin, Ireland’s beautiful capital, from February 1-4. IxDA is a global network dedicated to the professional practice of Interaction Design.

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On Tuesday, January 24, Google Waterloo opened its doors to engineers from the Kitchener-Waterloo area to participate in the first ever Ship Wars Programming Competition.

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The 25th Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference once again brought together a diverse population of neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, statistical learning theorists, and applied machine learning researchers in Granada, Spain, December 12-17.

The very first Girls Leading in Development and Engineering (GLIDE) community kick-off event was held last month at the Google Tokyo office. The GLIDE community was launched in Japan recently with the mission to encourage women to excel in computing and become active leaders in the field.

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As we mentioned in a previous post, Googlers traveled to Boston this month to participate in the Usenix LISA '11 conference. Nearly 1,300 IT professionals attended this year’s conference to discuss cutting edge system administration techniques and technologies.

Code Jam is an annual programming competition in which professional and student programmers are asked to solve complex algorithmic challenges in a limited amount of time, using the programming language of their choice.

We participate in the sysadmin community in many ways. Many Googlers are involved in their local Unix users’ groups and give presentations at conferences. One conference we participate heavily in is the USENIX Large Installation System Administration (LISA) conference.

Cross-posted on the Google Student Blog

We are happy to announce that the 2012 GRAD CS Forum application is now open!

As part of Google’s ongoing commitment to encouraging students of underrepresented backgrounds in technology to pursue graduate study, we are pleased to host the 2012 Google Gradua

Last week, in Aarhus, Denmark, GOTO 2011 (the international software development conference) kicked off with the announcement of Google’s new programming language Dart a class-based optionally typed programming language for building web applications.

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On September 19 - 21, Google partnered with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) to host the 17th annual U.S. Frontiers of Engineering symposium at our Mountain View office.

[Updated October 14, 2011: check out the embedded video of Google @ Surge 2011 below]

Google was a sponsor of the Surge 2011 conference which was held in Baltimore, MD from September 28th through the 30th.

As you may have noticed, the Google Technical Programs and Events blog looks different today. That’s because we—along with a few other Google blogs—are trying out a new set of Blogger templates called Dynamic Views.

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