University Students Face-Off in Transatlantic CodeCon Challenge
January 27, 2016
Our most recent CodeCon Challenge went “Transatlantic” to find the ultimate CodeCon Champion.
The top three U.S. and top five U.K. regional competition winners were invited for the final challenge of the season, which was held simultaneously in Bloomberg’s London and New York City headquarters. Seventy-five participants from 27 schools faced identical questions … and only one winner walked away with the ultimate bragging rights (and also a really nice prize).
Congratulations are due to Raymond Kang from Carnegie Mellon who took first place, solving six questions in less than two hours, and also to those in second and third place: Karolis Kusas and Hamed Ahmadi, both students at the University of Oxford.
Using the coding language of their choice (C, C++, Scala, Python, Ruby, Java, Javascript, Rust, C#), students had two hours to solve eight problems of varied difficulty. (By the way, Raymond, Karolis and Hamed all used C++.) As a group, the average number of questions answered correctly was 3-4.
U.K. participants included students from the universities of Bristol, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, Southampton and St. Andrews and Imperial College London.
U.S. participants included students from Binghamton, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Cooper Union, Georgia Tech, Howard, MIT, Princeton, Purdue University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Rutgers, Stony Brook, SUNY Buffalo, UCLA, University of Florida, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, UT Austin, Virginia Tech and Yale.
Over a year ago, we launched CodeCon and the CodeCon Challenge to help people – particularly university students — improve their coding skills. Throughout the year, we held competitions at leading universities in the U.K. and the U.S. – challenging developers with unique problems and encouraging them to push their skills to the limit. To date, the platform has had over 125,000 code submissions.
While this CodeCon season has ended, the next one is just around the corner. You can keep an eye out for future competitions and challenges here and follow us on Twitter @TechAtBloomberg for updates and information.