What has IIIT Allahabad been up to this past week?

IIIT Allahabad has been programming, solving, clue-hunting, soldering, gaming, laughing, learning, and last but not the least, dancing alongwith a lot of guests from various colleges across the country.

Aparoksha returned for its third iteration this year, with anyone who likes to code, to build circuits, to design or is in any case interested in the world of computers and electronics being treated to a wide variety of events suited to everyone’skills sets - with an equal dose of fun to keep the stress levels minimal.

This year’s theme was “Laying the foundations of Skynet.” All events had some elements to it that reflected the theme. This cool looking logo was one of the more prominent declarations of the theme.

What “events” do you speak of?

• Github and IIIT Allahabad present Hack in the North, the country’s biggest student held hackathon. Yes, you read that right. The theme this year was “The Common Man”, with accessible technologies and hardware builds being at the forefront of 36 hour long development extravaganza. The selection process was very thorough with only the best of the best getting in. Food, drinks, t-shirts, swag, goodies and enviable prizes worth INR 100,000: this hackathon had it all. (Here’s almost everyone who made Hack In the North 2017 special.)

• Humblefool Cup, a competitive coding event named after the TopCoder handle of Late Harsha Suryanarayana sir, lovingly called “Lord Harsha” by his juniors - one of the best competitive programmers in India. This carried a cash prize of $500 in the onsite round, with hundreds of participants in the online round, and only a selected few getting a chance to compete for a lot of swag from TopCoder, and of course, the grand prize. The onsite round was held in the wee hours of the night, keeping in mind the coders’ sleep cycles. (Or the lack of it) (Yes, we had medals for the winners. And T-Shirts. We’re nice people.)

Humblefool Tribute Page Humblefool Cup

• The IT quiz for all the techno-freaks out there. The questions were found to range from moderately tough to absolutely hilariously painfully unsolvable.

• Blind Wars, Lang Challenge, Qwerty Wars:

  1. Blind Wars had the participants 1. typing code, only the screens were given some much needed downtime. Fair enough, right?

1. Lang Challenge was another niche challenge, with contestants being served up a pretty obscure, unpopular language and its documentation to boot. They were then given some problems to solve after being given some time (not nearly enough as the participants later said) to get a hang of it. The response was overwhelming.

2. Qwerty Wars was a novel event wherein using customized keylogging software, your typing skills were put through the crucible of many paragraphs worth of text, sometimes mangled and garbled, sometimes large and sometimes small.

• Code Queens: “Why should boys have all the fun?” is exactly what this event was all about. This event was a novel coding competition, with the lovely ladies being the only participants allowed. This turned out to be a wildly popular event.

• GitHero, for those who think the quality of their commits and merges is the equivalent of 300 year aged wine, and their repositories are the opposite of tangled earphones. The Git wave has seen a recent surge, with most of the population here preferring git as the preferred Version Control system, and to deploy static projects as well! The event was organized keeping in mind the fact that for a system used this regularly, not too many can claim that they’re using it in the most efficient manner possible.

• Counter Strike and FIFA in all their glory. Nothing much to say here, except we had projectors and other cool stuff. The gaming culture shines through the entirety of IIIT Allahabad and we pride ourselves for having a large, active gaming community. The staple game Counter-Strike finds itself as a symbol of the gaming culture that’s been associated with colleges for a long while now, and we’ve our share of pros and newbies.

• Aparoksha CTF, a Capture the flag tournament for the people who’ve got astounding skills at web and file exploits; reverse engineer as if it’s nothing; as well as WR1T1NG L1K3 TH15, and an unrelenting fondness for the words “n00b” and “pwn”. The aim here was to capture the flag (an obscure string of text, not like Shia LaBeouf’s “He Will Not Divide Us” shenanigan.)

• • TopBot was the flagship Electronics event, with two sub events: The Obstacle Course robot building contest as well as the Line Follower robot building contest. This had cash prizes worth INR 45,000 up for grabs, and many different ideas were put to pen, paper and bread boards: but only the best got their hands on these prizes.

Cool Robot incoming:

• • Creative Slam was a graphics design competition for the more aesthetic computer fanatics. Graphics design is on the up-and-up these days, so who are we to stand in way of the tide? The graphics designing culture is steadily gaining traction in here, and this is one of a series of events dedicat
• Perplexus, the bi-annual online treasure hunt.

• Treasure Hunt, the good old campus wide event. Our college has had this event as the best way to kick off festivities for a long while now, and is renowned amongst people far and wide as being one of the toughest and the most rewarding Treasure Hunts. Out went the “X”s and in came the QR Codes: a gentle reminder that the contestants were firmly in the birthplace of many a programmer.

• Now, the new ‘uns of the campus couldn’t be left out of the loop, and hence we had two special events for first year students (students of IIIT Allahabad only):
  1. C Fresh: A two round team competitive coding contest exclusively for the new coders, held in the same vein as the ACM ICPC - the Holy Grail of all coding contests. The first round saw participation from majority of the first years, and only the top third making it through.
  2. Tri Hacker Cup: The final round of the four-round long TriHacker Cup concluded during Aparoksha, which was a web development round. This was an attempt to teach the first years a wide variety of skills and helping them make informed decisions later. The four diverse rounds were: Competiitve Programming, App Development and Graphics Design, a Capture the Flag tournament, and this Web development and FOSS round.

There were a total of about 30 events held, from fields as diverse as back end web development to circuit redesigning and many multi-skill events such as the Tri techathlon.

Is that all there was to it? Events?

Not Quite.

The fest kicked off with a grand opening ceremony with various cultural performances to boot.

We had a big, big variety of events to keep everyone busy.

One of the best stand up comedians of the country, YouTube sensation Karunesh Talwar came to perform on the 25th of March. The entire audience was in splits during and by the end, everyone wanted an encore performance, which was expected since this was the first time our college bore witness to a stand up show.

Many tech talks were held throughout the duration of the techfest to spread awareness about things as diverse as making your LinkedIn profile shine to building a Data Analytics pipeline. (Come on, that rhymed. It’s not that rare a thing.)

The Closing ceremony was held to award prizes to the winners of a few special events as well as the overall best partcipants. They got nice trophies.

The DJ was called in to release the stress and pain of having participated and worked this hard to make the fest a roaring success. (The attendees’ words, not mine.) And oh, was that a befitting end to Aparoksha.

## And just like that, Aparoksha 2017 came to an end.