The winners of the annual EECS Programming Competition were announced on Saturday, 24th April, with over 50 participants taking part in the event.
The competition, which has been running since 2008, took place on Saturday, 24 April followed by an awards ceremony. Taking place over six hours, the competition tested each participant to solve nine different problems, each one worth 75 points. For each problem, each student had to code a solution which was run up against a series of test cases. For each test case passed, more points were awarded.
The competition was held virtually on the HackerRank platform, with each participant able to choose any programming language to solve the series of problems. The competition aims to tests students in a number of ways. The problems are puzzle based, but involve algorithms that are used in the industry, which aim to help our students in their future careers both in terms of problem solving and coding skills.
The winner, Yuze Liu, placed first with an impressive score of 665.0, and took home the main prize of a £150 Amazon voucher. Aaron Cuthbertson was awarded £120 Amazon voucher for second place with a score of 635.0, Max Jayatillake won third place with 565.0 points and a £100 Amazon voucher. Filip Sroka took home fourth place and Sahil Shingari was awarded fifth place.
Yuze Liu was surprised to win the competition: “I couldn’t imagine that I’d be able to solve all of the problems. During the competition, you need to have lots of different knowledge to solve each of the different problems. This includes mastering certain programming language, and understanding specific algorithms.
“I felt I had some good luck on the day of the competition, and also found using a debugging process helped me a lot. Whilst trying to solve a complex problem, it helped me to locate where the bug was, and how I could fix it. The six-hour competition was long, and I found taking regular short breaks also helped improve my performance.
“I chose to study at QMUL as it’s a renowned university across the world, and has a great reputation for Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially in Game AI. I really like the fact QMUL has courses that exclusively focus on AI, rather than combined with other computer science courses, which was very attractive to me. I hope to use AI techniques to improve the quality of my life. For example, in GAME AI, there is a technique that can make console games much more interesting. I’m also interested in looking in ChatBot and Dialogue-System to help solve issues around loneliness.”
The competition was organised by Dr Paulo Oliva, Dr Nikos Tzevelekos, and Clare Revell, who congratulated all the students who took part in this year’s event.
The full ranking, problem set and sample solutions can be found here: http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~pbo/competition/2021/