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Solve an interesting problem. Here's one I worked on a few years back. http://www.frank-buss.de/challenge/index.html. You can do it in one Saturday afternoon, and it should be fun. Polish it up, be prepared to explain your solution, and you're set.

Why are some pictures in black/white? With a small PHP script you can extract the images from the original site:
http://www.frank-buss.de/dilbert/
Sometimes there are some ids in a row which doesn't exists, but looks like it works at least starting from id=2012

http://www.frank-buss.de/marsrescue/list.php

The optimal solutions for both fewest steps and least fuel usage appear to have been found, which would make Jeremie Allard and Randy Sargent the winners for each finding both solutions. Allen Noe also deserves notice for being the first to find a fewest steps solution.

It appears most contestants required only about 3-4 hours of programming time and 2-20 minutes of cpu time. The problem was simple enough to apply a traditional shortest path algorithm, solvable in O(N) time, but with 5 instead of 2 dimensions, which required nearly half a gb or more of ram to store path information for the roughly 115 million possible states.

Three more prizes remain to be given out for exceptional solutions, going above and beyond the scope of the original problem.

I think I've got it right. I checked the Lisp code (my doc says I can Lisp, but dad says the other kids may make fun of me). I'd post the exerpt here, but /. thinks that Lisp is pretty lame. Look for method update-robot.

You're correct, I believe. This is made clearer by http://www.frank-buss.de/marsrescue/table.html, where at step 33 the speed changes from (10,-4) to (0,0).

Was the one written in SQL. A very innovative use of a database language.