16th Challenge24 – Russian victory, Hungarian Cup won by Sparrows again

Challenge24 has been attracting the world’s best programmers to Hungary since the year 2000. Hundreds of teams enter each year, so finishing in the first half is a serious professional accomplishment.

This year’s Challenge 24 was won by the Russian team, Dandelion, with team members Oleg Merkurev, Nikita Sivukhin and Alex Danilyuk, while the Hungarian Cup was won by the Sparrows for the second time, that is Ágoston Weisz, László Nikházy and Attila Dankovics. Moreover, Sparrows finished ninth in the international competition, so a Hungarian team made it to the first ten after several years.

The participants of this year’s Challenge24 finals had to tackle 11 problems. 30 teams competed in the international finals, three of which were Hungarian, and 9 further teams contested for the Hungarian Cup, so the event required two entire floors in the building of the Óbuda University. The contestants in the finals had to come to grips with controlling power plants. The hardware task was to optimize the cooperation of thermal power stations, hydroelectric stations and wind power plants. The participants additionally solved hexagon shaped Sodokus, cracked passwords, and analysed parentheses. In one of the popular competitive tasks the „players” reencountered a more difficult version of a problem familiar from the semi-finals.

Challenge24 was opened by the ITPicnic for the second time this year, an event attended by the contestants, Hungarian students and young graduates, providing the opportunity for casual shop talk with important professional partners of our association.

The participants learned about various problems and the most prominent enterprises while sitting on bean bags, plaids, and pondering together.

The participation of students was supported by Hungarian universities and foreign institutes of higher learning alike, and a host of Hungarian and international companies deem it important to seek out and get to know talents through this competition, therefore Fornax, the gold grade supporter of the competition founder has been keeping a close eye on the development of this initiative.