March 15, 2020 – Christopher Khoury, a student enrolled in the Computer and Communication Engineering program at Notre Dame University-Louaize (NDU), was part of the team to win 1st place in Lebanon in this year’s Google HashCode 2020.
A programming competition organized by Google, HashCode has students and professionals from around the world forming teams of 2-4 to solve an engineering problem. “You pick your team and programming language and Google picks an engineering problem for you to solve,” said Khoury. “What makes this competition challenging is that there is no right answer, you need to keep improving the algorithm to reach a higher score.”
Khoury and his team, Thawra, had to face more than the HashCode challenge itself. Choosing to participate in the Murex Beirut hub – one of the three hubs provided by Google – had the team participating alongside Murex employees with years of experience. “This put a lot of pressure on us because we had to keep pushing our score higher to keep up,” said Khoury. Their efforts were far from wasted, as Thawra rose to the top spot in Lebanon with a score of 26,689,699 points.
In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is unknown at this time whether the HashCode 2020 finals will still be held, but if they are, we will of course be cheering Khoury and his team on!