Communications of the ACM
Competition That Computes
David Fan and Bob Adolf (seated, left and center) of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences competed in the IACS Computational Challenge.
Credit: Harvard
Harvard University recently held its second IACS Computational Challenge, part of the ComputeFest program hosted by the Institute for Applied Computational Science (IACS). Last year, participants designed a system for evacuating a city following a natural disaster, but this year organizers wanted the challenge to be more engaging and attract more people.
Eight teams of programmers competed to design the best program for playing foosball, and they had just two days to test their mathematical and computational skills and emerge victorious in a 10-round tournament. Losers would fine-tune their code before the next match, but the team of Ph.D. students James Damore and Bo Waggoner was declared the winner after more than an hour of competition.
They first modeled the game as though none of the players were able to move, then found the optimal strategy for those conditions. "We just put our players in a peak distribution, and our strategy was to just have one player chase the ball on top of that distribution," Waggoner says.
From Harvard Gazette
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