Posted by mriekert on Thu 31 Aug 2017, 13:49:32 Thu 31 Aug 2017, 13:49:32

The annual Standard Bank Impact Challenge provides an opportunity for students to test their programming and problem-solving skills against students from universities across South Africa.

During the Heats, the first round of the competition, students had four hours to solve a set of questions. Students participated as teams and were scored according to the number of solved problems and the time it took them to complete the questions. This year 11 University of Pretoria teams from the Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Mathematics department participated.

The best team from each university went through to the finals. The 2017 finals focused on blockchains, the underlying technology that cryptocurrencies such as BitCoin are built on. The UP team “Awesome Source” with Ulrik de Muelenaere, Brent Walsh, and Jacobus du Plooy, went through to the finals and emerged as winners from the HashBlock phase. This is the first time that UP has won the competition, since its inception in 2005. The Department of Computer Science wants to congratulate these three winners for their outstanding performance and representing UP during the challenge.

We encourage other students to participate in the other competitions hosted this year and the 2018 Standard Bank Impact Challenge. For more information visit: http://cs.up.ac.za/courses/ACM101