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| title | created_at | description | author |
|---|---|---|---|
| MOZAIC: A Year in Review | 12-12-2017 | The idea of MOZAIC as project turns 1 year old, today, 12/12/17 | Wout Schellaert |
A Year in Review
The beginning
Twas exactly this day, in the late 2016, not snowing nor freezing, not a cosy winter evening at all, but a magical 'Pannenkoeken & Jenever-codenight-avond ' happened none the less.
It was that joyfull day the Massive Online Zeus Artificial Intelligence Competition, or MOZAIC for short, sprung from 3 overzealous minds. Back then we scribbled down some wants and wishes, and it took us way too long to figure out that the Z in MOZAIC could in fact just stand for 'Zeus'.
Going further
Only in the summer months some actual code was written, not that any traces of it can still be found, but as a spark it marked the beginning of what would soon become a real team creating a real project. We started with some simple Rust that played a game, and a single HTML page with some JS, that we just opened in a browser, to render it nicely.
We hosted a tiny competition for the new students on the first day, where they could write a bot in Blockly, a visual language. We had 3 (now 4) fantastic MOZAIC codenights where we all got together for some illusion of productivity.
Our Rust part has been refactored thrice at least, and the visuals moved from plain JS + HTML, to JS + React, to an Electron React client, to a TypeScript Electron React client. And one specific wacko is porting the rendering to WebAssembly.
We aren't close to where we want to get, but the team is ever growing, the spirits are rising, and it's all like we want it to be.
One year later
Twas exactly yesterday, 364 days later, snowing and freezing, on a magical 'Pannenkoeken & Jenever-codenight-avond ', that an extended team found themselves in a couch, looking at some whiteboard.
We brainstormed about how we wanted the interface for the game rules to look like, and we realized, as if the entire cosmos was created just for this moment, that exactly 364 days ago, we discussed the exact same thing, in the exact same couch, looking at the exact same whiteboard. The circle was complete. And it was time for a blogpost.
In no particular order, a big thanks to Kenneth, Jasper, Feliciaan, Robbe, Timo, Isa, Olivier, Mats, Laurens, Elo, Lorin, Tom, Arthur, Rien, and others who might not be on the contributors list yet.
Special thanks to Ilion.
Festive greetings
Wout
PS: Care to join? Ask question in the Zeus Slack (mozaic-channel), on the GitHub repo or directly of an aforementioned person.