Hash Code 2022 Qualification Round Livestream

Key Takeaways

[Music] [Music] [Music] hi everyone welcome to hashcode 2022 qualification round my name is tatiana i'm a software engineer in youtube tourig i'm part of the hashcode team and today is the fifth edition i help to organize hi my name is stephan and i'm a software engineer in chrome based in paris france for the past couple of years i have helped run hashcode thanks for tuning in we can't wait for today's qualification round and we hope that you are looking forward to it too before we begin we want to go over the agenda for today's competition we're just a few minutes away from the problems being released in the competition platform the problem will be live at 17 45 utc you will have 3 hours and 45 minutes to work on the problem and submit your solution before the round ends at 2130 utc to add a bit of suspense the scoreboard will freeze at 20 30 utc for the final hour of the contest your team will still be able to submit solutions and see their scores but you won't know how your team's rank changed until the end of the competition remember the 2130 utc submission deadline is a hard stop so in total you will have 3 hours and 45 minutes to submit your solution please be sure that you give yourselves enough time to get your submissions in and don't wait until the last minute to submit after the round ends join us back here for part two of the live stream where you get to hear from some google engineers and members of the hashcode team before we recap the round and announce the top teams we have some great content planned so be sure to tune back in this year you'll notice that our competition platform looks different we're excited to be providing all of our participants with this new experience for example on the scoreboard you will now see the score of individual data sets in addition to overall score if you have questions about your eligibility to compete or your registration status please email hashcode.google.com if you have questions about the problem statement or your submissions during the round you can use the ask a question button on the problem dashboard the problem statement that we release in a few minutes will specify the format of data sets the format of the submission files what it means for your submission to be valid and how the submissions will be scored you can use any programming language or even multiple different languages to solve today's challenge an important feature of hashcode is that you're free to use the development environment of your choice note that any team member can make submissions on behalf of the team and there is no penalty for multiple submissions each team can submit up to 50 times per 10 minutes and the output for each data set counts as one submission if you hear if your team hits the submission limit you just need to wait up to 10 minutes before you can make your next submission remember that with hashcode you execute your program on your own computer and then applaud your output for scoring we also ask that you attach a zip file with the source of your program the size of the zip file is limited to 100 kilobytes so please avoid including binaries or generated files we are not going to run the programs you submit but we'd like to be able to review the code to ensure that the terms and conditions of the competition are met remember that every team has to work individually and submitted solutions have to be original you can use third-party libraries and tools but please don't ask your family friends or strangers on the internet for help we rely on you to keep the competition honest and exciting remember that everyone is competing for a spot at our virtual world finals on april 30 where teams will be competing for medals cash prizes and their spot in hashcode history finally before we start the round we wanted to say huge thank you to our virtual hub organizers hubs are a unique part of hashcode and allow our community to grow and feel connected organizing a hub is a lot of work and requires a significant time commitment we're so grateful to be part of his amazing global community of developers the hashcode team put together a short video to say thank you that we'd like to share [Music] thank you we know organizing a virtual hub takes a lot of time and hard work so we wanted to say huge thank you as hub organizers you helped make the hashgraph qualification round magical the huts you lead have helped connect thousands of developers all over the world to one another we've created a community of creative thinkers fostered growth and development and had some fun along the way thank you for your contribution to the hashcode community we couldn't have done without you we couldn't have done it without you we couldn't have done it without you we couldn't have done it without you thank you hub organizers for just a few moments from the problem being released so get ready remember we'll see you back here on the live stream once the contest ends good luck good luck everyone and happy hash coding [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] welcome back congratulations on finishing hashcode we hope you enjoyed the round as much as we did the rest of the hashcode team is busy calculating scores so we have a few minutes together before max and david join us to reveal the outcome of the round and the top teams you are going to hear from some of our colleagues over the next few minutes while we wait for the results on the round first up you'll hear from timothy a code gem engineer if you've competed in hashcode before you might have noticed that the competition platform looks a little bit different this year timothy is here to talk about this change timothy take it away hey everyone i'm timothy bezelli i'm a software engineer on the coding competitions team here at google this year we really wanted to create a nice unified experience for our hundreds of thousands of users all across the world originally hashcode ran on a different system than code jam and kickstart you would still register on the coding competitions ui but you then had to head on over to the judge system to form a team and compete we wanted really to bring this together and make it so everything can just still be in the coding competition's website all in one place to provide a consistent experience so we got some design docs we started designing and thinking what really makes hashcode contests different than codejammer kickstart contest and the major difference is their team contests so in codejam and kickstart you would compete individually in the original system a user would go to the site and submit an attempt and that attempt will be attributed directly to that user however this isn't necessarily true of team contest so we added an additional layer and introduced an entity called a competitor a competitor allowed us to proxy through the submissions directly through that and then have the system just see the submission coming from a competitor so now for code jam and kickstart contests the user has an individual competitor when they go and compete the submissions go directly through that and the system just sees it as if the competitor is competing but for team contests we'd have a team competitor so multiple users would be a part of the same team and now when any of them submit it's as if that team competitor was submitting so they can all see the submissions from any of their fellow competitors and then we had to do the same thing now for the questions ui but what's nice is since we already have these competitors we can reuse them for the questions functionality that way if you or any of your teammates asked a question you'd all be able to see the question as well as the answer but there was one other big difference with team contests and that's you actually had to register and form a team originally for code jam and kickstart rounds all you have to do is create a profile register for the contest and you're good to go you're ready to compete but that again that's not true for team contests so in hashcode we had to again change the system change the backend api as well as make the ui be aware of this additional step that you've created a profile you've registered for hash code but you're not actually ready to compete the way we implemented this is until you create a team you don't actually have a competitor that is ready to compete in that hash code route so you're kind of just registered for the contest but not quite there yet ready to compete then when you form a team or you join one it will assign you to a new competitor or competitor that already existed and now the ui is aware that you're ready and you're able to compete and start participating in hashcode and scoring some points we really hope this made a much better unified experience for all of our users but that's all for now thanks everyone and we'll throw it back over to you in the studio thanks timothy it is really cool to learn about that migration to the competition platform next we're going to hear from tory our hashcode program manager and wallet an engineering manager on android they're going to talk about building and managing efficient engineering teams while fostering growth which may sound familiar if you just completed today's challenge hi i'm tori and i am the hash code program manager based in san francisco california i'm here with wale who works on android and today we're excited to get to chat a bit about building effective and efficient engineering teams a topic that inspired today's qualification round problem thanks for being here with us today wallet yeah my name is wale okomale and i'm a principal engineer at google i've been a group for nine years now working on the android framework developing pretty awesome apis and infrastructure for developers like yourself and device manufacturers on android it's really amazing to see so many programmers teamwork to solve this year's qualification problems it's it's pretty awesome well welcome wale thanks again for being here uh like i said um i think this is gonna be a really exciting conversation and uh you're just the person to chat about building these effective engineering teams you've had such an amazing career at google um working at android for a really good chunk of time um so i think i'd love to just kick off the conversation and ask what excites you most about the work that you do on android and managing these engineering teams yeah sure um i think the thing that excites me the most about android is the continuous evolution android set it up as a pretty small print system for phones in the early days and now you can kind of see it everywhere from tvs to watches to on to cars and even like the entertainment system on planes it's pretty remarkable it's been pretty exciting to be part of that journey it's been pretty humbling to to kind of continue to improve the infrastructure um improve the api surfaces so that device manufacturers and app developers can continue to deliver innovative awesome products on android i mean like um three years ago we decided to work on affordable devices it's kind of crazy now you have phone displays that can bend and it's like wow that is awesome then you're also like whoa that is awesome but i can think of you know gazing on different fps i wouldn't work in this environment so how do we make things work so it's crazy it's it's pretty awesome to continue to see that innovation and improve android to 200 new new things yeah wow i mean i can only imagine how exciting it is to work on a project that's had such an amazing evolution and kind of this boom in growth since you've been there um today our problem is about utilizing skill sets uh of individuals on a team um since you manage such a large number of engineers i can imagine this topic it's pretty close to home um when you're given a new project how do you choose individuals with the right skill sets to be on this project and contribute to the work i think that the few damage is that um in an environment like google we have obviously have a ton of talented capable engineers and that's one lesson for us to worry about but i think finding people that have a passion or interest for the kinds of problems you want to solve goes a long way on the project and also finding people that this is actually more important finding people that collaborate effectively across teams projects usually take an entire team pulling together to be able to deliver well and you want people that walk while in that team environment to to be able to you know push the product forward otherwise you kind of end up in an environment where you are trying to deliver on the pro on the project and the team dynamics is just causing a ton of friction and preventing the team from actually realizing their full potential yeah i think that if anybody who has ever been on a team where collaboration isn't sort of the core of the culture um it can be really tough uh you know to get motivated about the work and really solve problems so um it sounds like collaboration is sort of at the core of of all of your team and the culture that you create um in your current position you have such a large number of teams reporting to you um i can imagine that you're always juggling a number of projects and uh you know team members and things like that um how do you prioritize these projects and sort of ensure that you can be a resource to uh all of your teams i i'm also subscribed to effective delegation i think i can't be everywhere at the same time and give everything my attention but everything does require good attention from somebody that can take care of it um so to that end i actually focus a whole lot more on mentoring and coaching um align my leads and you know managers that report to me to realize their full potential being a support for them to on top help them grow their strengths and realize their weaknesses and their um put on their you know their skills um by growing people you kind of create you know a ton of opportunities or many youths that can take care of things without you you know being in every single room and you can then support them to to help us for us advance the set of the out on the project so i think it's it's a ton of mentorship coaching and delegating huge parts of the projects to to the people that you trust and can be responsible with the project yeah i i think that's perfect and i think interestingly enough that ties really well back to the our hash code qualification round problem um where mentorship was this aspect that you had to build into your solutions um so definitely a direct parallel there um inevitably there are going to be learning curves on teams uh like you said everyone's got different strengths and weaknesses um how do you ensure that you're encouraging progress on a project while still fostering sort of this knowledge sharing um and learning uh amongst the team yeah but the few tactical things we kind of do at google to to up with that we have things like team summits where everybody comes together in one location now not as we do virtually and share what we're working on i have you know deep dive and people ask questions on on each project and we also have things like tech talks that go um that take place year round where people give an in-depth technical presentation on what they what they're working on um outside of that i feel it's important for a manager to focus on a team culture of collaboration and inclusiveness you want people to feel comfortable in the team you won't be able to feel welcome at the time you won't be able to feel at home at the team um when people can bring themselves to work at the entire team and you have like team members that are very collaborative people are more open to ask questions because they feel it's an environment that they're comfortable in and that they can thrive in um so so i think if you get the team culture right and it's one that is inclusive and collaborative people will naturally ask questions and share information yeah definitely i think feeling comfortable is so important to a healthy work environment comfortable with your co-workers um the work that you're doing your manager um and i think it also allows for this sort of uh culture of it's okay to make mistakes um which is as we know key to engineering work mistakes are so core to moving a project forward and it's also quite a hash code in that there's no optimal solution to anything and really you submit these solutions uh you learn from them and then you try to continue optimizing them and your experience how important is failure in engineering work i feel failure is one of the most important in engineering work it's it's we try we try and we try again it's it's i think it's also important as how humans learn and grow in general um it's actually built into the culture google where we have things like blimness postmoderns um where the goal is to understand what went wrong and how we can do better next time versus assigning blame to a specific individual as in general as humans we're going to make mistakes and we're going to fail it's more important what we learn from those mistakes and how we move forward from our failures than anything else that's how we grow and i think you know it's kind of in our dna you're learning to ride a bicycle you're gonna fall what do you do if you get up and you go on that bicycle again and you try again once you learn it right i i definitely agree and and i think that this was a beautiful discussion that sort of um really emphasized the parallels between some of these problems that we're solving in hash code and the real engineering work that takes place uh every day at google so thank you so much for being here today we really appreciate you taking the time um the announcement of winners is right around the corner so be sure to keep tuning in and back to you in the studio we are just a few minutes away from revealing the scoreboard and the result of the round before we do we're going to talk about the problem development with two hash code engineers who you might recognize because they have been part of the competition for many years from egg and michael over to you hello everybody thank you for joining our live stream my name is shamak i'm a software engineer i work at google friends i'm part of the volunteer hashcode engineering team and today i have the pleasure of interviewing my colleague from the hashcodes team amigo how do you want to introduce you yeah um so anyhow i work in a google touring office i work on youtube as my main project and as my 20 project i help to organize hashcode excellent and miho i know that you are one of our most seasoned uh hashcode contributors when was the first time you got involved in hashcode and why did you get involved in hashcode yeah so it was quite some time ago it i joined google in the paris office in 2014 and at that time shemeg was helping to organize the um the second edition of hashcode i think that was uh and i had a little background in kind of participating in the programming competitions and that looked interesting so i said okay let me help a little bit and since then i am involved in i was involved in i think every uh hashcode edition and that's quite a few it's hard to believe but it's i think eight years since the second edition that was the one where you joined um there's a lot of different things that needs to happen for for hashcode to take place we have the registration system we have the scoring system we need to prepare the competition problems is there any specific part of hashcode that was interesting to you that made you want to contribute to it yeah so for for me the interesting the most interesting part about preparing cash code is the problem statement the problem like when we choose the problem when you think how to make it easy to understand how to make it uh interesting uh and then like the data sets uh to make sure that that the the uh the contestants have some challenge to to to solve so about that how do we go about picking a hash code problem there are so many problems in this world how do we pick the tool that we select for uh for the competition each year yeah that's uh uh that's that's difficult always like we have we have a kind of like discussion or each problem we should pick but we have some criteria so we want that problem to be realistic we want something that like actually google engineers uh are working on that the problem should kind of reflect uh what we do as our daily job the second thing is we want hash code to be accessible to everybody now you don't you shouldn't need to have a lot of programming experience so we want the problem to be easy at least easy to understand and easy to get started because the third dimension is like we want the problem to be hard we want the problem to be hard to solve optimally because the hashcode there are some hashcode teams that are like actually a lot of hashcode teams that are really good at solving those kind of problems and we want to make sure that the problem is is challenging for them so it seems that we want to have a problem that is easy to solve imperfectly but very hard to solve perfectly how do we go about this how do we know that a problem has those properties yeah so it turns out that there is a category of problems np heart problems this is kind of from theoretical computer science and it it turns out that like each time we choose a a hash code problem it falls into this category so we we could and we make a mathematical proof that oh this problem is really like one of the hard problems um we basically show that like okay if you could solve the hashcode problem you can solve uh any other np np and be hard problem and the nice kind of side effect of this is that if you solve if you have an optimal solution for hash code problem you basically solve one of the biggest biggest questions in theoretical computer science so if you do have such a solution then the consider publishing in in uh in a scientific paper so it's worthwhile to think about the hashcode problems uh something that i like very much about this is that uh for hashcode problems you can be very knowledgeable about um the theory of computational complexity like you are me how and then reason about all of that but you can also not know much or anything about this and still enjoy solving the hashcode problem i think i'm closer to this side of the spectrum personally um so this is great um the next question i would have to you me how is how do you feel about this specific problem that we we just run in the qualification round yeah so this problem i i like it a lot uh when when you propose uh proposed the initial kind of idea uh i uh i really like it really like uh resonated with me because there are so many uh interesting parts in this problem like there is this part where like you work together like there's this aspect of working together as a team like each project has to have multiple people on it too and there's this uh this aspect of kind of leveling up like becoming better and better like improving your skills which is like both relatable to kind of my my daily job but also uh relatable to kind of like it feels like a video game one of those video games where you want your character to be better and better and there is this mentorship aspect where like you want to help other people to get better and they interact in a very nice way so i i really like this this year's problem i think this is one of our best problems so far and uh i think it's not exactly like a a problem where we actually have engineers at google solving it in the sense of writing a program that assigns people to products like this is not happening but this problem is indeed grounded in uh in the reality of work and product planning at google where we want the products to complete and succeed and we also want to learn as we as we work on them um great the competition problem today came uh with a problem statement and with multiple data sets what's up with the data sets uh why do we have multiple data sets anyhow yeah and so actually like as i said we want the problem to be both approachable so we have datasets that are easy but we want the problem to be challenging as well so we have the we have uh datasets that are uh other that are difficult but we we usually have uh at least some ideas from the kind of theoretical proof that it's hard we put them in in their data in data sets but also the different aspects of the problem uh each each dataset usually focuses on a slightly different aspect of the problem so uh so one so the nice aspect of this is that a solution that solves one dataset optim like maybe not optimally but like really well it may be not doing so well on other datasets so this encourages the teams to to to try to find different approaches uh maybe like also to encourage to uh to to look at the datasets themselves because each of them is different so maybe everybody can find the data that they like in the ones that we provide um hopefully um finally me how is there anything you would like to say to hashcode contestants and hub organizers yeah i mean first of all thanks a lot for uh for joining the competition i i hope that like the contestant you had fun thanks a lot for organizing the hubs because this uh this really brings a lot of energy into uh into into hash code and i hope we'll see each other um in the next hash code editions i hope so too uh three most important things about hashcode the community the community and the community thanks a lot to everybody for being part of this and hope to see you soon again yeah thank you wow so cool we could have shared how hashcot problems are developed we won't keep you waiting any longer the moment you've been waiting for has arrived max and david are here to recap the round and reveal the top teams another huge congratulations to everyone who participated in hashcode today max and david take it away hello everyone i'm really happy to be with you tonight i hope you had a nice but not too stressful competition we've received submissions from thousands of teams all around the world and we are really happy about this now the competition has ended you can just relax and enjoy drink i'm david manager in the technology services team at youtube and i'm live from our office in paris i've been one of the few of the hashcode crew who were there since the inception of the competition back in 2014. i'm here with my dear colleague max hi i'm max i'm a software engineer at youtube here in paris i'm also part of the hashcode organization team and i'm super excited to see all the participants from all around the world today but first of all thank you a lot for your patience i know like 30 minutes have passed since you submitted the last solution and the competition is over and you're all waiting for the results so we're going to briefly recap around and announce who was the winner of these uh this year's edition of hashcode of course the top teams are invited to the world finance in april we had a lot of fun running this round and it looks like you did too thanks a lot for sharing those magic moments with us we are very excited to see participants from all over the world enjoying the competitions we've been running the competition for many years now and we've seen students using our past problems for their master thesis we've seen professors using our problems for exams and we've even seen universities integrating hashcodes into their university curriculum we are really humbled to be part of this community so 30 seconds on this problem this year's problem is actually inspired how we work at google there were two different inputs a list of projects that required a number of skills for example c plus bus or python and also a list of contributors each of which had some skills as we had to match the contributors with their projects to fit their skill set for example one of the projects the web server here and then the skills of the contributors improve once the projects are completed so they can work on more projects later from my perspective this is a very nice mixture of an assignment and a scheduling problem i hope you enjoyed it too but now let's talk about the composition so we were super excited to see that the first team submitted after just 33 seconds and was called fully developed that was super lightning fast wow but this was not the only thing within like the first minutes the scoreboard felt filled up so if you look at the early scoreboard um there's just within a minute um it's entirely like all the team submitters already so congrats for all the teams working very effectively a bit later just six minutes and 44 seconds in the team lesser caberns managed to score above the standard score of submitting the example um so super super good work by them and from then on people got higher and higher scores david what can you tell about this yeah indeed to be totally transparent with you we do a lot of internal testing of the problem beforehand of course in order to ensure that the data sets are balanced and of different difficulties it means that google engineers actually competed in internal rounds and during our dog fooding phase that's how we call it our internal team scored a maximum of 3.9 million points and the first team to beat that score was make love not war after two hours and 45 minutes with a stunning two uh 3.95 million points very very impressive another thing i want to point out is the is our favorite team names every year you get more and more creative uh with team names and we love seeing all of this creativity on the scoreboard here are a few we we liked the one for example who written their team upside down but also some games like drop the bass or hashcat and hashcats reunited were really funny to to watch one hour before the end of the competition as a tradition we froze the scoreboard in order to add a little bit of suspense into the competition here are the teams that were in the top position when we float the scoreboard in just a moment we share the final score award so you can see how your team stacked up against the competition remember that top teams from today's round will be invited to compete in the virtual world finals on april the 30th regardless of where your team placed on the scoreboard we hope you enjoyed working on this your challenge and have some fun all right the moment that you've all been waiting for has arrived we're going to reveal the top teams as of the unfrozen scoreboard we are still validating the submissions it means all the results are preliminary but now it's getting excited let's go we will start per data set actually since this year also we had scores on the scoreboard per data set and whenever two teams had the same score the team which scored this the maximum score first will be displayed on the slide so data set a as you might imagine it's fully developed again score 33 and because they submitted fast but now a huge congrats on the team developing this data set because it will be different teams over and over again this one i think it's a person staring at something with a score about one million on data set b on data set c the team scheming kittens with a score around uh 285 000 um on data set d dance schedule team make love not war um with a score of 674 000 on dataset e the qr coders with 1.7 million and finally on and they said f proof by submission of a score of 1.2 million so as you can see here we don't know anything about the winners of this competition yet which is quite nice so um david who do you think is on position number three so on position number three it's uh with our usual suspect it's the team past glory with 4.092 million points congratulations position number two max it was super tight in fact there were exactly 4 360 points between position 2 and 3. i'm very happy to announce on position 2 there are the rethinkers with 4.096 million points congratulations now let's see who the winners are you always this moment so let's go they crushed it with more than 100k points more than the second team and i have the pleasure to announce that the winners of the 2022 hashcode qualification run are the team make love not war with 4.22 million points congratulations [Applause] congratulations to everyone who participated in hashcode today right after the live stream we will release the scoreboard so that everybody can check their final score we hope you had fun in your team or competing in your hub we will invite the top teams to the virtual finals so please check your inbox next week early next week if you are on the top of the leaderboard if you just missed the deadline to submit your last solution actually we're going to reopen the same problem statement in practice mode so you can continue to optimize or try a different approach but of course these solutions will then not count into the final ranking as the competition is over also we would really like to hear from you so for example on your favorite social media platform you can post your solutions using the hashtag hashcode solved or you can just discuss how other teams solve the team um finally we would like to stay in touch with you for example you can join our facebook group google hashcode or follow us on twitter on gcoding.coms and there we post updates on all the coding competitions by google so david what can you tell us about the other competitions yeah perhaps you really loved competing with us and you want more and google actually has not won but two other different coding competitions the first one is kickstart and registration are currently open so you just have to go to g dot co slash kickstart in order to register and then there is also the well known code jam which is coming up registration will open next week on march the 1st on g dot co slash code jam so be sure to register to compete for the championship and a chance to win the grand prize if you're interested in other ways to connect with developers in your local community check out also our google developer groups in the url mentioned here that's the end folks thanks a lot again thank you and thank you so much for putting all this energy into this round we had fun organizing competition i hope you also had a lot of fun and with that congratulations again and goodbye you