I think it is a brilliant idea, and I would love to try it. However, I have mixed feelings about the fairness of the competition. Based on their website, they started building it in 2022 and have already participated in some hackathons: “This project was made by game designer Tomo Kihara and the design/art duo Playfool as part of the ‘Art Incubation Program 2023.’”
One common issue with hackathons is that some participants take an existing project and make minimal modifications to fit the rules. This type of hackathon is particularly susceptible to these ‘grey area’ projects. For instance, someone could take an old project built with GPT and simply switch it to Gemini and claim it as new. It will be up to @Lloyd_Hightower and his team to evaluate whether this is the case and, if so, determine if it can still qualify as a winning entry.
I participated in hackathons in the past were the judges missed these type of issues. Let’s hope it does not happens here
Unfortunately, the rules didn’t say anything against it.
I came across a project and tried to find the app online to try it and found out that it had already won some hackathon before like over a year ago. Felt like they just refurbished the project to use Gemini.
Moreover, I’m sure there are many apps created by 10 or lot more people (even well funded companies) while most of us are 1 or 2 person team who have to compete against them.
There are people who just do various unethical things to win competition money as much as possible.
Ha! They are barely responding in these forums, let alone in email.
What will the report be about anyway? These submissions didn’t break the rules. The rules ONLY mentioned that you cannot be a Google employee or an immediate family member of Google employees as grounds for disqualification.
As @Desai_Hardiklinked to the organizer’s response regarding this, literally anybody from the world could’ve submitted an already successful app, a well-funded startup, or old apps that have already won competitions as a submission in this competition. How else would it be 3K+ app submissions?
This ALL makes Google look good if there are tons of polished submissions - all valid. Whether they are picked as winners or not depends on the organizers. It’ll look weird to me IMHO if Google picks an app that won another competition here again though
I don’t think that does anything, the rules are clear and they are allowed to participate no matter how old their projects are. At this point, we should move on till the results come.
Yes, they are allowed but still, it can affect the scores. They wrote that it is good that you have a new project that is not available on the Play Store or Apple Store. However, old projects are allowed.
I think it’s fine. Gemini has basically been around as long as the current competition, so they’d still have to retrofit it to the AI. It’s a 3 month hackathon. Some people did it full time, which I think is an extreme advantage, especially the students. I built mine in a week full time.
They’re still at a disadvantage. Outdraw has excellent UI, but there’s no points for UI. They’re missing out on impact and usefulness points, which is 40% or so. Where’s sustainabilty or inclusivity? It’s a lot of work to rewrite a lot of code to fit these restrictions. It might end up getting less points than a high schooler who built an education game from scratch.
This is pretty much the Olympics or Oscar tier of hackathons anyway. In your average hackathon, champions get $5k. In this one, the lowest prizes are $50k. So you’d expect to compete against world class players.
Hey everyone, Tomo and Dan from the outdraw.AI team here. We appreciate your interest and want to clarify our game’s timeline. Back in late 2022, we began exploring the seed of what would become outdraw.AI. In this early version, called “Deviation Game”, we experimented with Google Quick Draw data and TensorFlow (ChatGPT wasn’t a thing yet) to figure out the base mechanics of the game.
However, we started integrating Gemini in May 2024, which completely transformed our project. This shift required us to rebuild our game design, code, and UI from the ground up, and was an entirely new 3-month-project in itself. As our game had evolved so much we rebranded to “outdraw.AI” to reflect this big step.
As indie developers, we understand how our long-term effort might raise questions about fairness. We interpreted the competition rules not as a time-boxed hackathon, but as open to any products using Gemini as a key feature, which ours certainly does. Our intention wasn’t to gain an unfair advantage, but to showcase how Gemini revolutionized our project.
Ultimately, it’s up to the competition organisers like @Lloyd_Hightower to decide if our submission meets their criteria and we’re grateful just to be considered among the many fantastic entries. Regardless of the outcome, we’re excited for you all to try our game soon!
