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This is gallery from off camera.

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So my question, and one of the most interesting things that I've seen year over year, is that there's always this sense of the next organizer has to one-up the last organizer for the CTF's design.

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Or in some senses, right?

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So in the one year, we had the custom architecture.

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And in the other year, we had...

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Lightning wrote that.

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She's over there.

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And in another year, we had a switch of architectures in the middle of the game.

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And we've seen those things.

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You've been playing CTF for a long time.

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Yeah .

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Do those, I'll say, tricks actually slow people down?

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Or is there... I'm sure in the middle of the first time it happened, there was an, oh crap, what is this?

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But what do you think that CTF is going to evolve into based on what we've seen so far?

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Yeah.

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And maybe I don't want to give spoilers about what Nautilus is doing this year.

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I don't know as much even the details about what they're working on.

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Because I'm working on this component we can talk about in a little bit.

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But that's... yeah.

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So it's a great question of all.

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It's a couple of pieces to unpack there.

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First of all, yeah.

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So Lightning is over there.

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She built the most horrible architecture that has ever been invented.

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And inflicted great pain upon competitors.

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I actually personally knew about it in advance.

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And in fact, at the time, she was even like, do you want to build a binary ninja architecture plugin for it?

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Because I make binary ninjas.

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It's my day job.

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It's reverse engineering software.

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And there was a question of, do you want to add support for it?

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And we looked at it and we were like, it's nine bits width instead of a power of two.

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It's middle-endian.

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So not little-endian or big-endian.

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It's middle-endian.

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I was just like, nope.

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No, I don't.

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I have to do real work.

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I can't.

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I'm not going to spend the amount of time it would take.

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Oh , goodness.

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But the teams were told the week of.

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They're like, by the way, here's a CPU specification for this virtual architecture that the game is running on this year.

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Good luck.

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And to tell you the truth, I actually told the organizers that year.

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I was like, I think this is a bad mistake.

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I think it's too much and teams won't be able to do it.

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I was wrong.

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And I was happy to be wrong because I think it worked out great.

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Teams adapted and they built their own tools.

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They cobbled together stuff on the fly and they made it work.

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And so that, I think, is the hallmark of what makes CTF fun, is that you don't know.

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But there is also this sense that over the years, there's a progression and institutional knowledge.

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A lot of the changes, whether it's broken or not, whether you have these sort of what are called Superman defenses where you move things around, and sort of knowing and having played before, you do kind of come in with a sense of, I think I know some general techniques that I'm going to use.

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So who knows where it's going to go?

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I will say that I don't think most organizers look at this explicitly with the goal of, I have to absolutely outdo.

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They want to make a good game.

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They want to make a game that challenges the competitors, that showcases the best, that's smoothly run.

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So especially a team's first year taking over, they don't want to rock the boat too much, you tend to see.

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Because you just want to show people, no, no, no, we understand what CTF is.

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We're not going to make something it's not.

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We're not going to make it totally an unpleasant thing.

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We still want this to be the premier catch-the-fly competition.

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So it's usually in later years, people start to experiment and try different things.

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But yeah, there's been a bunch of crazy stuff over the years.

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And so much of that gets lost to the annals of people's minds and history, unfortunately.