Imagine Cup Memories

I often refer to the Imagine Cup as “Planet Imagine Cup”. For a few days the real world, time and space have no meaning. You are just in a little space with lots of projects to look at and a whole bunch of interesting folks to talk to. And strange things happen.

The first piece of weirdness was having my picture taken by the chap who wrote Tetris Note that is by the chap, not with him. The whole thing took place in the judging room, when one of the judges wanted his picture taken with me. There’s no accounting for taste. Anyhoo, the only other chap in the room was Alexey Pajitnov, who was kind enough to take the blue HTC device from my friend and snap the picture. I didn’t have the nerve to ask for one of my own, but I did have a chat with him, and told him how many hours I’d spent with my Mark 1 GameBoy and his ingenious game.

The second weird thing took place was when one of the judges, Bill Buxton, mentioned that he’d found a couple of entries in the competition intriguing, and had reached out to Bill Gates (who was something of an expert in the project areas) to let him know what was going on and get his input. Bill had responded with some comments and had made time to pass on details to a couple of experts in the field. Amazing.