I went to a national science fair with a friend who (completely on his own) came up with a novel, patentable way of reducing drag on ships. I don't remember th

I went to a national science fair with a friend who (completely on his own) came up with a novel, patentable way of reducing drag on ships. I don't remember the details, but he went to the international stage with it, justifiably, and there was a fair bit of fluid dynamics involved. For me, science fair was the only thing that kept me going to school. (Indeed, I dropped out the next year when I was disallowed from competing.) The project that got me to the nationals was about comparing the efficacy of genetic algorithms against neural networks in a game playing task (with a multi-machine, networked simulator); looking back, it was a big mess, and there was a lot of dumbness (that, if I had had even one mentor, could have been rooted out), but it wasn't dissimilar from unambitious master's projects in the CS department at my local university. Many projects at the national level were much more sophisticated. Like any school competitions (does the author think math and programming contests are any different?), people with ambitious parents who push their children, and especially children in private schools (that often dedicate class time to working on these competitions), have a massive presence at the higher levels. But what's nice is that you don't have to have any of that to get to those higher levels, either. Motivation is a funny thing.