Last year’s project was titled “Fire in the Bosque” and
Christopher Morrison made remarkable progress on his own after his team member
dropped out of the Supercomputing competition soon after the Glorieta kickoff.
He was able to create a forest environment model with C++ that modeled how the
heat generated from a fire in the Albuquerque Bosque would spread. 
Last year’s program was not as accurate at modeling fire flow because
it attempted to model fire based upon principles that don’t follow realistic
fire flow. The basis of fire flow was founded upon the transfer of heat rather
than the current program that differentiates the fire flow process from heat
flow. Basically, last year’s program used an algorithm which averaged
temperatures and would mark the patch as a “fire” if the temperature
in the patch was over the flashpoint of that particular patch. The program lacked
the ability to track the fire’s exact location across the landscape because
it lacked the fire flow process which is this year’s program’s founding
principle.
In essence, the inaccuracy of last year’s program lies with its discord
with the Elliptical Fire Theory through its algorithm. Its base flow formed
a square or diamond shape rather than a perfect circle under perfect conditions.
Therefore the basis of the old program has been disproven by its violation of
the Elliptical Fire Theory.
Furthermore, last year’s program was written in C++ for the SDL graphics
emulator. It lacked the ability to graphically display the detail that this
year’s program has attained using C++ for the OpenGL graphics emulator.