From 1985-1991, I competed in Odyssey of the Mind. (Side rant: Odyssey of the Mind was originally known as Olympics of the Mind back when I began participating. Apparently the aggressive and somewhat litigious International Olympic Committee forced the name change — not that there was any chance of people confusing a bunch of underaged geeks building crap out of cardboard, paper mache’ and poster paints with a gathering of international atheletes, but whatever. The O in OM (which is all we ever called it anyway) was quietly changed from “Olympics” to “Odyssey” and we all carried on about our business.)

The point of OM was to put together a team and solve one long-term problem. Each year, four or five different long-term problems were presented to choose from. Although the problems changed each year, there were five general categories in which the problems fell: vehicle problems, technical problems, Classics, structure (“building a bridge out of balsa wood”), and performance. Over the years I think I tried all of them except the balsa wood one. Once the problems were announced, we formed teams of 5-7 kids and went to work. After working on the problem for a few months, we all travelled to “state competition” and competed against other groups of nerdy kids. For us this took place in Ada, Oklahoma. If you won at state, you moved on to nationals. I had a few friends who went to nationals over the years. My teams never made the cut. This is all a huge simplification of Odyssey of the Mind; if you want to know more, Wikipedia has a nice summary.

While each of these problems had pages upon pages of rules (and potential penalties), the most serious penalty a team could receive was a “Spirit of the Problem” violation. A Spirit of the Problem violation meant that you basically didn’t solve the problem — essentially, you failed to meet the minimum requirements. For example, let’s say the problem was to make a grilled cheese sandwich. If you made a sandwich but burned it, you might lose five points; if you didn’t manage to assemble a sandwich at all, that would be a Spirit of the Problem violation. The most you could score was 100. While most other penalities ranged from 1 to 5 points, a Spirit of the Violation problem penalized a team 100 points or so, essentially reducing your score 0 (and beyond).

One important thing to mention here is that we (the kids) were responsible for all ideas and work. Each team had a coach, but it was against the rules for s/he to give us ideas or perform any work (except for anything deemed dangerous to kids — welding, for example).

The first time any of my teams received a Spirit of the Problem violation was I believe in seventh grade. A few friends of mine and I had taken on a vehicle problem. The problem consisted of a real life 10×10 grid. On the grid were 3 randomly placed treasures, and 3 randomly placed dangers. Our first task was to write a computer program that would generate a path throughout the grid that would pick up all the treasures, and avoid all the pitfalls. Once the computer provided the solution, the solution had to be conveyed to whoever was operating the vehicle, who would then steer it around the real life grid, following the computer’s path. Basically, we had three problems to solve: writing the computer program, conveying the computer’s solution to the vehicle operator, and building a vehicle. All of this had to be performed non-verbally, and the computer was situated so that the vehicle operator could not see the monitor.

Even in 7th grade, I was doing quite a bit of Apple programming. We decided that it would be much simpler for a computer operator to generate the solution, so instead of having the computer solve the problem, I wrote a graphical 10×10 grid that could be maneuvered by using the Apple II’s arrow keys. Pressing “plus” dropped a treasure in a grid, and “minus” dropped a danger. Once those were in place, the computer operator could maneuver around the virtual grid, and the arrow keys left a little trail. The system we invented to convey the results to the vehicle operator involved a 10×10 grid painted on a piece of wood with Christmas lights mounted to it. If I remember correctly, blue lightbulbs represented the path, green meant treasure and red meant pitfall. The person operating the board would look at the computer screen and enter fill the grid in with lightbulbs. If that sounds cheesy, wait until you hear about our vehicle. Basically, it was a giant pair of shoes. One of the requirements was that the vehicle operator had to be four inches off the ground, so we nailed a couple of 2x4s to the bottom of two sheets of wood, and ran rope through the wood so that you could hold on to the shoes. The vehicle had to carry two people, so with two of us on the shoes holding ropes, we walked around the grid, collecting our treasure.

Shortly after our performance, we were informed that we had received not one, but two Spirit of the Problem violations. (In retrospect, I’ve never heard of anyone else receiving two.) First, we were told that “shoes are not a vehicle.” I don’t remember the specifics but I can only assume there were some details somewhere about what qualified as a vehicle that we did not meet. And second, at the competition they informed us that the computer was to generate the solution, not a person. Oops. Out of 100 possible points, I think we scored a -175.

Sometimes when I am programming at work on something I thought about that OM project. I’m not sure I could program the thing now any better. Maybe I’ll try again one of these days.