Challenge Overview
HP IDOL OnDemand Jeopardy Game
Hewlett Packard has developed a set of JSON-based REST API’s which enable both conceptual and parametric text search capabilities. As a demonstration of this functionality, HP is going to host a Jeopardy-like competition on the [topcoder] platform. In this game, the competitors will be developing algorithms and code to maximize their chances of answering questions correctly about certain topics. In this challenge, we’ll be developing a web-based arena which will host the competition. We’re going to be developing the code and the design of the arena in parallel and they will be merged at a later point.
The arena application will have a login page and a section where the competition itself will be hosted and the participants can interact. The competition itself will all be automated as the submissions will be received in advance. The arena will ultimately have chat capability but in this challenge we’re going to focus on the game play capabilities themselves.
Here is the basic idea of how the game will work:
For each question:
1. Application asks questions and post questions to screen
2. The application poses each question to each submission by executing an HTTP GET web request with the question text in a URL parameter.
3. Application posts the answers that it obtains from JSON response delivered by the submitter’s code.
4. Application displays the answers for each submission
5. Application updates the score for each submission.
Both the arena and the client application are web applications that will interact with each other through HTTP GET requests and JSON responses. In a separate challenge we’re creating template code for the client applications -- “the Answer Service” which the arena will interrogate in order to determine the answers to the questions in the game. Each competitor in the Jeopardy game will be provided with this template as a starting point for the competition so that they can focus on developing code and algorithms to answer questions rather than the mechanics of making API calls or parsing JSON requests.
The focus of this challenge is:
- Creating the web app infrastructure and build scripts
- Creating the game play functionality itself.
- Creating a basic login and admin login pages.
Detail requirements are found in the attached requirements specification.
This platform is called IDOL OnDemand and at this point is in the Early Access release phase, open for all Innovators to use.
New HP IDOL OnDemand challenges launched weekly! Check http://idolondemand.topcoder.com for a complete list of HP IDOL OnDemand topcoder challenges.
Final Submission Guidelines
Detailed requirements are found in the attached requirements specification.
1. You should use Java for this web application.
2. Provide a video of your submission in action
3. Write a guide on how to build your submission.
4. Please provide your submission as a zip that includes a .war file that can be deployed to an Application Server such as Tomcat.
5. Please provide a text file called submission.txt in the root directory of your submission that contains a link to your screen sharing video.
Employees and direct and indirect subcontractors of Hewlett-Packard Company and its subsidiaries and other affiliates (“HP”), and employees and direct and indirect subcontractors of HP’s partners (including TopCoder and its affiliates) are not eligible to participate in the challenge.