Virginia Collegiate Game Jam 2025 Entry

Congratulations!

You've been selected for interview at ESIK Robotics.

You will help debug the new "hold" command in the bESIK Robot-Controller-Terminal or RCT, which relies on robotic intelligence to provide an easy-to-use program for picking up and moving objects. All you had to do was hook up a funky cable to your phone line, and they're letting you do the interviews from home!

Do you have what it takes to make it through 3 rounds of interviews and a trial day?

About ESIK

ESIK is the biggest robotics research institution in the world. It's privately run, but also receives funding from 3 governments and outside donors. Their goal? To put robotics in the hands of the people!

The company can be roughly divided into an engineering wing and a data wing. The engineering wing handles the robot hardware, and the data wing handles the programs that control the robots.

10 years ago, innovations in semiconductor manufacturing made robots easier to build, and programs easier to write. Software became less about performance and more about usability.

About bESIK

5 years ago, Researcher Sandra Krell devised a text-based interface that brought teletype-systems to the modern day. Pragmatic computing accessibility and productivity tools, all in beautiful 16-color text, integrated with new digital text-monitors. Fellow researcher Stephan Kristin Geir adapted this into bESIK, an "operating system" utilizing the text-monitor to send commands to robots. In theory, his technology could command entire fleets with ease, and he had shown some promising results himself, but it didn't catch on due to being too hard to learn. And worse, Krell had left the company to work for a new graphical-interface company following the text-monitor wave, so there was a void of expertise at the company.

Last month, ESIK's data wing decided to start bESIK from scratch, as a team. Only a few days ago did the Robot-Control-Terminal reach its current form.

About You

You purchased one such text-monitor and a second-hand keyboard 4 years ago, but mostly used it as a home computer to mess with software from the various pop-up companies that came with the technology's success. You have little expertise in ESIK technologies, and all you were able to find on the new system is some esoteric documentation.

Somehow, you managed to make it to the practical interview. You're nervous, but you can't let that get to your head.

You have 2 rounds of practicals with Big Stephan himself, and 1 with this weird guy named Franz Bagel. Apparently he's the mastermind behind a lot of the robot intelligence at the company, a recent transfer from the engineering wing. They've been spearheading the development of the RCT together, so it would be good to remember their names and hashes. Whatever a "hash" is.

At the end of the last message you received over the cable:

Big Stephan's hash: <023fgf> ext. <000011>
Franz Bagel's hash: <8fga00> ext. <00034a>