The University of Trento showed off once again at Google Hash Code, the international programming competition for teams from all over the world that, for a few hours, made borders and distances disappear. In the competition, the students and experts participate from their homes wherever they are all over the world on the internet. The competition is organized by Google, which invites the participants to solve an engineering problem. This year's problem was to optimize the schedule of traffic lights in large cities, like Lisbon for example.
The participants could choose their team and the programming language. The overall objective of the competition is to promote IT knowledge and find young talents.
The competition took place yesterday from 18.30 to 22.30 (Italian time). UniTrento participated with 46 teams including 165 students (23 more than last year) and placed second in the general ranking and first in the category of university teams.
The results were announced by Google yesterday at the end of the challenge.
For the firth year in a row, the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Trento organized a Hub for the online qualification round to Hash Code 2021.
Alberto Montresor, coordinator at UniTrento, commented: "Despite the pandemic, we have had even more participants than last year. This demonstrates how our students want to live the full university experience beyond distance learning. I am very satisfied with the number of participants but, most of all, I am proud of the results achieved: our students were great".
Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the competition started with online qualifications, where teams competed in hubs provided by universities, companies, associations. There has been a significant reduction of teams (25,000 last year, only 9,000 this year) but they were all highly motivated: 80% of the participants passed to the next phase. Of these, 276 were Italian teams, 43 from the University of Trento. Other Italian universities participated, from Padova, Bergamo, Bolzano, Venice, Salerno, but with less than a dozen teams each. The best teams will now be invited to participate in the world finals of the Google's Coding Competitions.