Citadel & Correlation One · Terminal Live

MIT vs Harvard — Terminal One Hackathon

Representing MIT against Harvard, as a team of two. We made the final and lost 5–4.

  • Python
  • Adversarial bot
  • Game AI
  • Runner-up

In March 2020 I was the runner-up at Citadel's Terminal: the MIT vs Harvard Terminal One hackathon. Terminal Live is an AI programming competition that has run across more than 30,000 engineers and data scientists at universities in the US, Canada, Europe and Asia. At Terminal you didn't play the game by hand: you wrote an algorithm that played it for you, and it fought other people's algorithms. I didn't think we had any chance, since we were up against some of the brightest minds in the world, but I applied anyway and did well enough to get into the event.

The Terminal game board: two algorithms, Infiltrator and Foreman, facing each other across a hex grid with health bars and structure points
A screenshot of Citadel's Terminal: two bots, a hex grid, and no human touching the controls once the match starts

I knew I wouldn't be able to do everything alone. So I convinced a good friend of mine, Akash Vaish, to apply too, and he got in as well. That made us a team of two.

A bot that watched its opponent

Through the initial rounds we worked on a bot that could adapt based on the opponent's attack and concentrate our offence accordingly. We ran a couple of iterations on it and arrived at a decent implementation.

We named it Go Get It. That got shortened to go, and then the versions piled up (go1, go2, go3), so what landed on the board was just whichever iteration we'd last shipped. It did well. And suddenly we were representing MIT in the finals.

Terminal leaderboard showing our bot go3 among the competing algorithms, all written in Python
go3 on the board, up against the rest: everyone wrote in Python

Three teams a side

There were only three teams on each side: some of the brightest minds in the world, and we were one of them. It was exciting, and the expectation was enormous.

We took the feedback we got from the fellow at MIT and updated the bot. We had been working for about ten hours straight and time was short, so we stitched everything together and shipped a final version. We were relieved just to submit before the deadline, but the main showdown was still ahead.

5–4

In the end, we lost 5–4.

We finished runner-up, which came with a certificate and a cash prize.

Certificate of Achievement: Shubhransh Jagota, second place winner of Harvard vs MIT, Terminal Live — issued by Correlation One and Citadel
Signed by Correlation One's co-CEO and Citadel's Head of Campus Recruiting. Verify it

Overall it was a great experience. The adrenaline rush just before the submission deadline, and during the final matches, is something I still cherish today.

Full credit to Akash Vaish: none of it would have happened without him. The OG gangster.