Erik participated in this year’s HashCode in the team with two of his colleagues under the name “Arithmetic terror”. They managed to get the score of 9,439,481 and take the first place in their hub (University of Rijeka). Globally they were 1295th out of 9004 teams that participated and on country scale, they were 8th in Croatia.
HashCode is a global team-based (2-4 participants) programming competition organized by Google. It is primarily intended for engineering students, however anyone is free to participate and try to solve real-world problems. HashCode starts with a qualification round in which a single problem is presented with multiple test cases. Only the best qualified teams will be invited to take the part in the final round. Unlike other programming contests, HashCode’s distinctiveness is that there is not only a single valid solution to the given problem. This is what makes HashCode so exciting: to find the best possible solution. This year, the goal was to optimize the schedule of traffic lights to minimize the total amount of time required for cars to get to their destination. Shortly put, contestants were given a list of streets in the city, how they are interconnected and how long does it take to travel each of these streets. They were also given a list of rides in that city and each car wants to get to its destination as soon as possible. For each completed ride a team would get a fixed score and a bonus depending on how quickly the ride was over. Participants had 4 hours to find a solution to the given problem.