Farewell, Google Hashcode

A couple of days ago, I got this email from Google:

Hello labarilem,

As you may already be aware, on February 22, we made the announcement that Coding Competitions were ending this year. We are sending you this email to remind you about the major milestones that are coming:

• April 15th: Farewell Rounds. One more chance to enjoy Coding Competitions. You can register now or see our FAQ for more details. The problems will be available for practice right after the rounds end, so you may try all of them at your own pace.
• May 1st: Problem data, including statements, analyses, test data, and custom judging code will be published in a separate permanent storage for access post-July 1st. A link will be shared in the FAQ before the end on or before May 1st.
• June 1st: Sign in will be disallowed and information other than that available in public scoreboards will be deleted. This means that if you want to keep your personal information, including practice or trial submissions, participation certificates, and profile information, you need to download it before this date. The ability to practice on past problems, including the Farewell Rounds problems will be available until this date as well.
• July 1st: The Coding Competitions site g.co/codingcompetitions, including all the static content, scoreboards and submitted solutions, will become inaccessible. As before, if you wish to save any of this data, you must download it ahead of this date. Remember that the information, and specifically others’ source code, is subject to terms and conditions of use.

For more specific information, check our 2023 timeline FAQ.

While we, like many of you, are sad to see our beloved competitions end, we look forward to engaging with you in the many forms Google has to offer, as users, partners, and maybe one day, co-workers.

The Coding Competitions Team

It reminded me that another Google thing was dead. Well maybe one of my few favorite Google things.

But it mostly reminded me of the fun my friends and I had competing in our first Hashcode.

We tried to prepare a couple of days before the competition but we were too busy to just sit down and work through the problems of the previous Hashcode editions.

When the competition started, we had a couple of energy drinks and no Hashcode training. But I think we did a good job, ending up ~1000 in the global ladder. We also beat some italian university hubs. Our approach started from a meta-heuristic algorithm implementation which we customized to squeeze out more points until the time ran out.

This is us after thinking we did a good job:

Definitely good times.