CMU-Q hosts Qatar hub for Google Hash Code competition
Teams of coders gathered at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar for the Google Hash Code competition, a contest that challenges the programming skills and creativity of students and professionals from around the world. This is the third year that CMU-Q has participated.
Although the event takes place online, competitors are encouraged to come together in “hubs,” where groups of teams tackle the problem in a common space. CMU-Q was the only hub in Qatar for Google Hash Code 2019. In addition to teams of CMU-Q students and alumni, one team of students from Qatar University also competed at the hub.
“I encourage students to participate in competitions like this because they are a nice playground to test your programming skills,” said Eduardo Feo, a postdoctoral research associate in computer science at CMU-Q and the organizer of the event. “When you interview with the top software companies, they will give you similar questions to the ones in these types of competitions.”
A student team works on a solution for Google Hash Code 2019
Feo and Giselle Reis, an assistant teaching professor of computer science at CMU-Q, also competed at the hub to encourage and motivate the student teams. Feo and Reis placed in the top 5% of all teams worldwide.
The Google Hash Code submission system is kept open for a few days after the contest is finished. Reis noted: “One of our freshman teams continued working on their solution over the spring break, and ultimately earned more points than the solution Eduardo and I developed. We are very proud that they took on the extra challenge.”
The team, which included Hao Mei, Samar Rahmouni, and Dorde Popovic, was one of three freshman teams in the competition.
Students watch the leaderboard for results
Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science (SCS) is a world leader in computer science education and research. The Carnegie Mellon campus in Qatar offers two undergraduate SCS programs: the bachelor of science in computer science and the bachelor of science in computational biology.