CPSSD 2nd years, Noah Donnelly and Cian Ruane, came out on top of 53 University teams from around Ireland at this year’s Google HashCode competition held in the School of Computing last thursday evening (23/2/17). What’s more amazing is that their webform crushing team (name) '"><script>alert()</script> placed 164th out of 2815 teams from various Institutions from around European, Middle East and Africa. That puts them in the top 5%, a fantastic achievement.

 

https://hashcode.withgoogle.com/hashcode_2017.html

 

Google HashCode is a team competition where teams a given a real-life engineering problem from Google to solve. Past problems have included Optimizing Street View Routing or planning altitude and direction of a fleet of LTE equipped balloons to provide Internet to remote areas. This year, students had to optimize the video-serving infrastructure behind YouTube to handle requests reliably and quickly. See below for the problem statement.

 

 

DCU was one of 467 hubs around Europe, the Middle East and Africa all competing in the online qualification stage. The top 30 scoring teams from over a total of 2815 teams are invited to the Final Round at Google Paris on 1st April.

 

Inspired by @DCU_AIPO’s Ed Sheeran mix, a caching solution quickly crystallised for the '"><script>alert()</script> team with the lads simply filling each video caching server in turn. This ‘simple’ solution slotted the lads into an amazing 8th position overall 30 minutes into the competition. Cian has detailed their final solution in more detail on his blog.

 

Full Scoreboard can be seen here with Irish HashCode Scoreboard below.