Enigmatic Bees of Anarchy win the Entelect Challenge University Cup

Teams from the University of Cape Town (UCT) grabbed both first and second places in the recent Entelect Challenge University Cup.

The one-day hackathon, held on 3 August 2019, saw  teams of students from various universities around the country challenged to solve a coding problem. The one-day event fits in well with the students' academic schedules, while challenging them to flex their intellect with a fun and rewarding task.

This year, 71 teams competed, with UCT putting forward 17 of these, the most for any single university. Of the 71 teams, only 37 managed to get onto the scoreboard - 12 from UCT.

The winning team was Enigmatic Bees of Anarchy, with team members Bronson Rudner,  Andrew Mc Gregor and Emile Tredoux, two third years and one first year. Second place went to another UCT team, Titanium Purple Tractors.

"Initially, after we read the problem statement, we decided to implement a basic approach to better visualise the data and gain some information on how our solutions would be scored. Thereafter we deduced how the scorer weighed various parts of our solution and we proceeded to maximize our score with this new information," says team member Emile Tredoux.

"We started by using a very basic algorithm to tackle the very first test case. To get a better sense of the larger test cases we created some graphs of various parameters to determine if any of them were strange edge cases which we could take advantage of. After a while we found a very good solution that worked for all the test cases and we began optimising it. We determined that our solution gave a score that was close to a theoretical maximum which we calculated. Once we discovered this we were pretty happy, and we couldn't find anyway to further optimise our solution," said Andrew Mc Gregor.

Being able to watch the score was a definite highlight of the competition, but the team also found it nerve-raking, worrying that they would be overtaken.

Each member of the winning team won a gaming laptop and some interesting gadgets for their university's lab, as well as tickets to Comic Con Africa to attend the Entelect Challenge. The semi-finals and finals of this event will take place in Johannesburg in September 2019

Entelect Challenge is an annual coding competition where students, professional developers, and enthusiasts develop an intelligent bot to play a game. This year, the game is Worms and involves managing a team of worms to strategically outwit your opponent.