Holy XP

LLM corruption
LLM menace
Debugging the program, for reasons
Playful LLM

Inspiration

We mostly built off of the Y2K idea.

What it does

We simulate a real time stock exchange with gaussian distribution, we also used an additional program to display live stock market updates on a Bloomberg themed stock ticker terminal with line graphs displaying the asset prices and how they vary over time. In this game, you are a Hedge Fund manager, trying his best to stop his firm from collapsing during the hight of the 2000's dot com crash. You will receive news and possibly some insider tips via email which could be beneficial, or complete lies. It is your job to decode all the information you are given and sail your ship to safety

How we built it

In order to work most effectively and play to each of our strengths, we divided the workload, James took control of the LLM, which would write the emails and news the payer would receive in real time. He was best suited to this task as he has experience working with local AI models in the past and during hacknotts, had spent a lot of time building a custom AI model from semi scratch. Avi was the creator of the stock market game, and the live chart system. He used tKinter to make the visuals and translated his python program into react, to more easily display it in HolyXP. He also paid close attention to the balancing of the game, at first, he realised the version he designed was far too easy, and increased the difficulty through numerous playtests and balancing asset values using mathematical models. Bilal had the most experience making webapps, so we felt he was the strongest candidate to make the frontend of the app, and he used react, paired with various methods that he quickly taught himself on the fly to create a windows XP/ year 2000 themed operating system which would be the backdrop for our game. Last but definitely not least, Ilya was our main backend developer, coding the nitty gritty of the program. He worked closely with james to get the local AI model working and compatible with out program. He also assisted in designing some of the various apps/ minigames the user can play outside of the main stock market simulator.

Challenges we ran into

We lost access to a remote server which was hosting the API and backend. This lead to problems with Cloudflare int he school where the WIFI would block a port that Cloudflare wanted to use. Furthermore this lead to a lot of time being thrown down the drain on the AI models, thankfully, since James had experience in this area, he was able to skilfully work out a solution and put us back on track. Another challenge we faced was the clashing programming languages, since Avi only had experience with tKinter in python, he had to spend a heavy allocation of the 24 hours learning how to translate his existing python code into react to allow his program to work simultaneously with the front end of the app. We were all exhausted with this project, working all throughout the night, notably Avi had to sleep on top of the table, which as you can imagine, wasn't the best night sleep.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the way the GUI looks, and the seamless integration of our python app into a react enviroment. Furthermore, we pride ourselves on our lack of use of AI to code the project, and we hope the judges can appreciate a hand coded project, when especially in this day and age where many teams use AI heavily to do the thinking and coding in their project. Although our project may have bugs, and may not be the best, again, we hope you can appreciate the bugs as a natural artifact of a hand coded program, by first time hackers.

What we learned

During hacknotts, we learned how to collaborate as a team and during this process we definitely learned how to become more proficient in more languages that what we walked in with. But also how to adapt to different problems under time pressure. Additionally we loved meeting new teams and speaking to different people and learning about many new ideas and expanding all of our coding repertoire.