Post Felicity 2021 Events

This article delves into the events that were conducted or whose results were declared after the stipulated dates of Felicity (25th to 27th February).

Decode

The Threads team, as a part of Felicity, conducted the event “Decode” on 1st March at 9 in the evening. Participants tested their De-‘coding’ skills while racing against the clock in the 2-hour contest conducted on CodeChef. It was a fresh experience for the programmers as they had to hack the buggy codes in C++ by providing hacky solutions. With the buggy codes giving WA or TLE, participants were asked to find test cases for which the solutions failed.

According to the programming club, the contest was a great success, receiving 1400+ registrations, more than 1300 of them being people outside IIIT-H! Notable participants include Jay Leeds (Geothermal), Egor Kulikov (EgorK), Arjan Bal (arjan_bal), among others who are considered to be some of the best coders in the world. Geothermal also wrote a blog commending the quality of the contest. 

Prizes worth over 11K INR were given away to the participants in  3 categories: Global, Indian, and IIIT-H. Geothermal, Nishank Suresh(iceknight1093), Anshu Garg(anshugarg12), and Tanuj Garg(tanuj208, who, incidentally, is from IIIT-H) were the top performers of the contest.   

According to some of the participants, the questions were clearly stated and had a bit of an IIIT-H connection to them as well! The solution contained subtle bugs, making them hard to spot (Indeed, a question’s buggy solution had YEZ written instead of YES, which was the only bug present!).

Trinetra

Pentaprism, the photography club at IIIT Hyderabad, conducted its flagship event, ‘Trinetra,’ from 22nd February to 1st March. It was the first inter-college photography contest conducted by Pentaprism. It received more than 650 submissions from colleges all over India.

The contest was open to professionals and non-professional photographers alike. It did not require any prerequisites and even encouraged mobile photography if they did not have professional cameras.

Basic editing, including colour enhancement, use of filters, and cropping of the photos, was accepted, provided it did not affect the authenticity of the images. However, advanced editing used to create illusions, deceptions, and adding or removing elements from the photos was prohibited.

There were three categories: Nature, Street Photography, and Animals. The overall winners were decided by considering all the submissions under the open category.

All the entries were judged based on creativity, composition, and editing by Mr. Anand Rathi, alumni of IIIT Hyderabad and founder of reels and frames.

The top 3 contestants from each category received cash prizes, while 4th,5th, and 6th prize winners from the open category received t-shirts.

LitQuiz

The Literary Club organized a pop-culture quiz on 28th in which more than 30 teams participated. Some people participated solo but most teams had either two or three members each. The prelims consisted of two rounds – round one had multiple-choice questions while round two had short answer-type questions.

The quiz was organized such that with each passing round, the difficulty level of questions took a ride uphill. Only six teams reached the finals of the quiz in the end. Finals of the quiz were conducted in the classical Pounce/ Bounce format by quizmasters Mayank Goel and Ashutosh Bharadwaj.

The quiz featured themes varying from novels, poems, films, comics, anime to memes, TV Series, and Internet culture.

Ambush

Felicity ’21 Ambush was a robotics-based event conducted by the Electronics and Robotics Club IIIT-H on 28th February. The event took inspiration from recent events and proceedings relating to drones, such as the shooting down of drones by the BSF and the deployment of anti-drone defences near the Red Fort.

Ambush was a multi-round event, starting with an MCQ quiz on the dare2compete platform. Following this was a problem-solving round. The contestants were given problem statements and asked to submit viable solutions in the given time. The final round then consisted of an interview with the judges based on the participant’s submissions. The final winners won quadcopter drones with AppControl and camera capabilities.

The event garnered 40-50 participants from various colleges, and the event organisers were quite pleased with the turnout of people with such diverse backgrounds.

Attack on Frame

The Decore Club IIITH, on 24th February, conducted two hour-long tutorials introducing Adobe Animation and Adobe Audition. Following this workshop was a contest with the contestants forming teams of three submitting a 2-minute animated video on this year’s Felicity theme- “Save the Fest.” Teams had till midnight of 1st March to develop a captivating storyline and nice animations to win up to 4000 Rupees worth of goodies. 

Triathlon

Triathlon was a three-part gaming event held throughout Felicity 2021 by the Gaming Club. It featured BrawlHalla, Valorant, and a Minecraft Battle Royale. The three events were held independently to encourage participation, but there was an overall winner. Around 100 people took part totally, with 65-70 people registered in Valorant, 36 in BrawlHalla, and 40 people in Minecraft.

BrawlHalla

The first part (BrawlHalla) was held on 25th February. The participants had to organise themselves in three members’ teams and duke it out against other teams in a tournament-style format.

Valorant

The second part (Valorant) was held on 26th February. It required the participants to organise themselves into five-person teams and shoot their way to victory in the new Escalation game mode. Each team had to kill and race the opposition through a cycle of different weapons and abilities, advancing together through 12 Escalation levels.  The first team that finished level 12, or came the furthest along in 10 minutes, won the Escalation.

Minecraft

Held on 27th February, the third part of this event was Minecraft. The college had been reconstructed inside a Minecraft world, and this round took place in the virtual academic block. One would think that the academic block would be a peaceful place designed for educational purposes, but not this time. It had been turned into a deadly battleground where this game was held in a Hunger Games format. 

The pool of participants was split into groups, and each group had its match. The top few participants were then made to play one last Hunger Games match to decide the winner.

According to the organisers, despite how fun the event may seem at face value, organising these games was not all fun and games (pun intended). One cannot expect an internet gaming tournament to slide without any hiccups. The Triathlon was no exception. Server setup had its issues, and getting ten people to be online – given their varying schedules – at the same time were some of the problems that came with organising this event.