This year at Blue Prism World we hosted four virtual Challenges in which Global teams worked to automate some key use cases within Blue Prism. The Challenges were extremely popular and registration had to be closed early as all spots were filled!
Global teams battled to overcome the Surface Automation Challenge: this challenge was to design and build a solution that could play the Windows Minesweeper game. Under @Chris Sneddon expert guidance the event was tough, enjoyable and rewarding.
The five teams had many challenges, one of which was to consistently identify the difference between a flagged mine, a blue block, an empty cell and different numbers. They had to do it by just surface automation and the VBOs provided in the challenge environments. This would require design ingenuity and solid Surface Automation development skills to craft a solution that could accommodate precise gaming logic against a complex application interface with gradient colours.
To make things more challenging the teams had to deal with an artificial light source rendered over the applications UI that created a gradient shadow from top-left to bottom-right making a cell that contained a "1" in the top left corner of the game board different from a cell that contained a "1" at the lower right. This effected all the images and added a significant challenge to identifying a block read by the Blue Prism process.
It was awesome to see each team show their strengths as they approached the challenge. While it was difficult we would recommend it to anyone that wants to truly learn more about Blue Prism surface automation. And who doesn't want to teach a robot to play minesweeper?
The winning team was Futonomers from Symphony in Poland @Michal Anchim @Pawel Olbrycht Edyta Rogowska, @Kamil Misko, @Piotr Palczewski - who demonstrated great creativity in overcoming the challenging obstacles as well as cleverly breaking up their build to maximize the contribution of team members in what was a very challenging timeframe.
Great work from everyone!
How would you have approached automating the gradient colours?
To hear about the other challenges please click the BPW 2020 Challenges hashtag below 😊
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@NorahAlsudani
Communities Strategy Director
Blue Prism
London
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