AI & DS Club: AI Gladiator's

About the Opportunity: AI Gladiator is a four-round, bracket-style team competition that tests participants across the full spectrum of applied AI/DS skills — general knowledge, generative image prompting, AI-assisted coding, and startup ideation and pitching. Teams face off head-to-head and are progressively eliminated across rounds, culminating in a live pitch judged by a panel.

Guidelines: Open to all students eligible under the club's participation policy; teams must be finalised at the time of registration. Team participation only — no individual entries.

Team size: minimum 2, maximum 4 members. Inter-college team members are allowed. Inter-specialisation team members are allowed. Round 1 draws from a question bank of 20-30 mixed-difficulty questions. Round 2 and Round 3 each use one target (image / output) per team match-up. Round 4 assigns each team a real, existing industry problem statement. Teams must report on time for each round; late arrival may result in forfeiture of that round, at the organisers' discretion. Any attempt at unfair means (sharing answers across teams, using disallowed tools, etc.) will lead to disqualification. The organising committee's decisions on scoring and eliminations are final.

Round-by-Round Rules: Round 1 — SpeedGPT Opening round to test teams' general AI/DS knowledge and warm up the bracket. Each team faces its bracket opponent in a head-to-head quiz.

Rapid-fire format: short questions with a tight time limit per question (10–15 seconds). Buzzer-based or simultaneous-answer format, using a buzzer system or a platform such as Kahoot/Quizizz for scale.

Question bank: 20-30 questions of mixed difficulty.

Round duration: 10–15 minutes per match-up. Round 2 — Pixel Prompting Teams are shown a target image on the projector. They must write one prompt (or a maximum of 2 attempts — to be fixed and announced upfront) to recreate the image using an AI image generator. Output is compared side-by-side with the target image on screen.

Scoring: visual similarity (judged), with bonus points awarded for fewer words used in the prompt. Round 3 — Coding Circuit Teams are shown only a target output (console output, a specific print statement, a computed result, a small game state, etc.) — never the underlying code. Teams prompt an AI tool (Assigned AI Tool) to generate Python code that reproduces that exact output. Code is pasted into the team's own environment (Replit, Jupyter, VS Code, or whichever is fastest for them) and run live. The first N teams to produce the exact matching output win, ranked by timestamp of submission. Round 4 — Brains to Bucks Each team is assigned a real, existing industry problem (e.g. logistics delays, farmer produce wastage, healthcare access in tier-2 cities) — not an invented case. Teams get dedicated prep time to research and ideate a startup solution. Each team pitches in a fixed time slot: 5–7 minute pitch followed by 2–3 minutes of Q&A. Judged by a panel; where possible, an external founder or mentor is invited to raise the stakes and credibility of judging.