Competition that computes

On the surface, it might appear that evacuating a major city following a natural disaster and playing foosball have little, if anything, in common. For students participating in the IACS Computational Challenge, however, both are problems that can be tackled with some clever coding.

Part of ComputeFest, a two-week program hosted by the Institute for Applied Computational Science (IACS) within the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences(SEAS), the Challenge offers students from across Harvard the chance to flaunt their mathematical and computing skills by trying to build the best solution to a given problem, or a strategy good enough to win a10-round tournament.

This year, they had just two days to do it.

In last year’s challenge, the first, students were challenged to design a system to evacuate thousands of Cambridge residents through debris-choked streets following a natural disaster. That competition played out over 10 days. For last week’s challenge, students were tasked with designing a program to play foosball.

To determine who did the best job, eight teams of programmers gathered last week at Maxwell Dworkin to let their programs duke it out.

As students hunkered over laptops to watch the games, the tension was punctuated by exclamations and high fives from the winning teams, while losers worked feverishly to fine-tune their code before the next match.

Read the entire article in the Harvard Gazette