Great Polish Triumph at this year’s Challenge24

2015. 07. 10.

This year’s jubilee Challange24 supported by Fornax among others was a success. The day was indisputably the Polish participants’, as not only did they win two prizes out of the first three, two further Polish teams made it to the first six.

This year’s jubilee Challange24 supported by Fornax among others was a success. The day was indisputably the Polish participants’, as not only did they win two prizes out of the first three, two further Polish teams made it to the first six, thereby snatching the advantage from the Russians.

The 15th jubilee Challenge24, the International 24-hour programming competition was a success this year. The contest organized by the Electrical Engineering Students’ Hungarian Association is one of the largest and supposedly most prestigious independent programming competition in Europe, and this year it was hosted by the University of Óbuda.

The students and professionals of 10 countries made it to the finals, this year, 13 out of the 30 foreign teams were from Russia. Challenge24 this year was won by the Polish team in the picture, HoChockiGon (Przemysław Dębiak, Marek Cygan, Jakub Pachocki), second place went to last year’s winner, the Polish PrecisionScrewdrivers, while  Charles_University_Legion with Czech and Slovakian members came in third. Two further Polish teams made it to the first six, ending the Russian predominance and advantage that had been typical of previous years.

On Day 0 of the cup the audience had the opportunity to meet at the International Geeks Together – Challenge24 WarmUp event, organized by Iseeq for the sixth time.

In addition to the international championship, the Electrical Engineering Students’ Hungarian Association also announced a Hungarian cup for the first time, which was one by Sparrows, a three-strong team from ELTE, Ágoston Weisz, Attila Dankovics and András Mészáros. Their result would have sufficed for the 12th place in the overall competition. Sparrows made it to the finals two years ago as well, that time they finished 21st.

This year’s exercises included challenges from the world of mathematics, algorithms, AI and hardware (image processing and cybernetics): there was a modified five-in-a-row game, in which the 30 teams competed against one another, and the hardware challenge consisted of having to guide a pong-pong ball into a hole with a fan. As time passed the task got more challenging with more obstacles appearing on the course. The video of the ping-pong activity can be found at: 15th Challenge24 Ping pong task 2

Fornax – 25 years old this year – visited the contest in the  building of the University of Óbuda as a diamond grade sponsor, in order to meet the young programmers and IT experts personally at the „Challenge24 picnic”.