"Ad HOC" Coding Challenge

TL;DR:  Heuristic programming competition, try to get as close to the solution as possible! ;) Sign up here: https://heurific.win.tue.nl/adhoc/

The CPPS track of the Honors Academy and GEHACK present to you – Heuristic Optimization Contest (Ad HOC), a brand-new exciting opportunity for you to show-off your coding and problem-solving skills. This unique challenge is organized for the first time, and we are very excited to see how you – our honored contenders will tackle it! Bring a few laptops, up to three of your most trusted advisors (teammates) and your sharp brains to the battlefield and face the competition! And in return we will provide FREE lunch and snacks during the contest and a small social drink after everything is over and the dust has settled. Then we will also reveal who proved to be the fiercest challenger and award them handsomely! We will of course also show off our own solutions and techniques.

Unlike other programming contests you are already familiar with like EAPC, BAPC, and FYPC, which reward contestants for their speedy implementation and clever tricks, Ad HOC rewards solutions which balance accuracy and running time. You will be presented with one (yes only one) problem, and you will have 4 hours to battle 5 instances of it. The problem is a real-life task that people (even within our department!) get to tackle every year (admittedly, on a smaller scale). However, something is not as it seems... The problem is unsolvable (in any reasonable time)! So, then the best you can do is try to get veeeery close to a solution! The closer you get, the more points you will score and at the end – the team with the most points wins! To put it simply, there isn’t just one “best” solution, instead you can score points with almost any solution you think of. However, some perform better than others and will bring more points!  

Finally, you are free to use ANY open-source software, tools, libraries, programming languages, etc. Just like in a war, anything goes. Well, our form of the Geneva convention applies, and you are not allowed to use paid services – like cloud computing or supercomputing power (basically no nukes).

Below, you can find the registration form to sign up and some extra information about the contest’s set-up and rules.

More information and registration form: https://heurific.win.tue.nl/adhoc/