Team Carrots win Entelect Challenge University Cup

Two final-year students, Ayanda Phaketsi and Maphuti Shilabje from the Dept of Computer Science made up the winning team in the 2nd round of the 2025 Entelect Challenge University Cup.

The team, called Team Carrots, came tops in the one-day hackathon where teams of students from various universities around the country are challenged to solve a coding problem.

This year's competition, "MegaZoo Master Planner," was a complex algorithmic challenge. Their task was to write a program that could autonomously design the most optimal and profitable zoo on a large 2D grid.

Their solution involved developing a deterministic, multi-pass packing algorithm. This program had to strategically place a wide variety of resources, from animal enclosures to visitor facilities, while adhering to a strict budget, complex compatibility rules (such as predators being located away from prey), and maximizing a 'visitor interest' score. The winning strategy prioritized resources based on their 'interest-to-cost' ratio, ensuring that a high-attraction zoo was built that was also highly cost-effective. 

The students are currently foccused on completing their BSc's in Computer Science and Business Computing. Following graduation, Maphuti aims to secure a software engineering role at a leading tech firm where he can apply his problem-solving skills to real-world challenges. "I am particularly interested in algorithmic problem-solving and large-scale system optimization. The Entelect challenge was a perfect example of this, highlighting the trade-offs between computational efficiency and finding optimal solutions in a vast search space. I am also keenly interested in the field of applied Machine Learning," he says.

Meanwhile Ayanda plans to pursue a career in full-stack development. "I'm passionate about building scalable and efficient web applications. My specific interests lie in clean software architecture and cloud computing technologies, ensuring that systems are both powerful and maintainable."

The Entelect Challenge has been running since 2012, with the aim of giving the best programming talent in the country various opportunities to show off their skills.