“I love deadlines. I particularly love the sound of them whooshing by!”

- Douglas Adams

I (and my team) was one of the 12 finalists of the first Google India Product Prodigy Contest, which required us to submit a proposal for an awesome new product on an open-ended theme i.e. based on Google’s motto of making the world’s information universally accessible and searchable. I think out of them, only 8 teams (including us) managed to actually finish something and display it at the Google Conclave.

A friend of mine (and later my teammate) had convinced me to join up for one IBM’s “Great Minds” competition, and had more or less caught me at a particularly vulnerable point of time when I was dissatisfied with life in general and my not participating in any competitions in particular. So with great zest, we began to waste a lot of time in meetings that finally ended ‘coz everyone had slept off. Me being an ardent admirer of Douglas Adams (of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame) follow the quote mentioned at the start of this post to the bone. That quote more or less summarizes how we worked for this Google Project. Everything basically got done a day or two before (often, after) the deadline.

The idea for our project: “Intelligent traffic routing”, later “iTraffic”, later “Smart Path-finder”, was decided after much deliberation, and then the proposal got prepared the night before the submission. Later as it turned out, life being heavy and hectic as it is usually for me, I got little time to actually do any substantial coding for this IBM project, and we ended up with a cartload of design ideas, and an awesome new path-finding algorithm which I believe could be much faster at giving an effective shortest-path than most of (or any) current path-finding algorithms (Side note: thereby suitable for AI in game development). To cut a long story short, we never really did submit our IBM project. Then the “Google India Conclave” was announced that changed everything. We submitted some dummy code that I concocted up in a few nights, and then we were told that we were supposed to actually present it in the GooglePlex Bangalore! That got me working finally, and I took a long 10-day break and went home (I stay in a hostel.. I’m in college remember?) and shut myself from the rest of the world and worked 18 hours a day like a maniac and generated work I’m really proud of with slick AJAX work and a neat 3-tier architecture etc.

Our project aspired to let the user select two points in on a city map, and provide the “smartest” path between those two points based on live traffic conditions. Its like Google Maps with the “live” element built in. Its NOT a mash-up as the GMaps API doesn’t provide sufficient node information required for any customized algorithm. The project basically has my sigmaServer whose sole purpose in life is to deal with traffic details, and using 13 commands it exposes through the HTTP protocol anyone can build traffic-based applications, websites, portals etc using ANY language and on ANY platform. I spent four frenzied days working on one example web portal that would graphically display the paths generated and also allow people to view important locations in the city, write reviews about places in the city, give ratings, read the latest City Buzz etc. The beauty of the sigmaServer technique is that I could have written a simple SMS based program in less than half an hour which would take two locations as an input SMS from the user, query the sigmaServer which would return the path in an XML or JSON format depending on the requirement, and send back a formatted list to the user through another SMS. Or millions of other such applications using just those 13 commands.