Hackathon Champions Again
Last year, within a week of being founded, the Vanier Tech Club saw one of its teams win the Université de Montréal hackathon. The club has since sent its members to various hackathons around Montreal with varying success and was finally able to come back to where it all started on the weekend of February 24th and 25th.
This year, the VTC sent three teams to the UdeM hackathon, joining another team from Vanier that was formed independently of the club. They were confronted with the challenge of programming an AI to beat a modified version of the 1980’s game Lode Runner. With only 24 hours to complete this task, Vanier’s programmers worked furiously to find the best strategy to win the game and translate it into working code free of bugs.
For the second consecutive year, one of the VTC’s teams claimed first place and were the only team that successfully beat all 16 levels of the game with their program. Tomer Moran, Mario Daccache, Naomi Catwell, and Alexandre Lavoie successfully employed an algorithm that searched the game’s grid for the optimal path to collect coins and get to the exit door. Diego Lopez and Cesar Sioufi, two members of the VTC team that won the hackathon last year, finished in second place, along with their teammates Bardia Shahrestani and Mark Beiline. With teams in first and in second place, this marks the best result for the Vanier Tech Club at a hackathon to date, which serves as a testament to its growth and its potential as a club.
The UdeM hackathon wrapped up a very successful February for the Vanier Tech Club, with two very good performances at hackathons and continued progress on its machine learning project. For more on the Vanier Tech Club or for any help with programming, visit the club room in D115 or send a MIO to Konstantinos Tsiolis.
Written by: K C Tsiolis
