A challenge that started with a motive to bring the programmers of Nepal under the same roof and have some fun ended with a remarkable experience.
We hosted an in-house Finale event of the Smart Bots Coding Challenge on the 2nd of July, 2022. With a presence of around 100 professionals, teachers and students engaged in the IT field, we honoured our three champions and all participants.
SmartBots - a tournament that ran over for a period of 4 months where 29 teams were constantly fine-tuning their algorithms, learning from industry players, and creating exceptional bots.
Event Highlights
Academics x Bhoos | A Discussion
We saw many professionals, teachers, and students from the field of Computer Science come together and discuss the possibilities of fusing academics and the IT industry through collaboration and conducting joint events.
Nepal is a country where theoretical knowledge is prioritized heavily over the practicality of the work environment, and this discussion did put light on turning the tables around. It will increase the opportunities for the students to find a position quickly once they start exploring career options.
Token of Love to the Mentors
Throughout the Qualifiers phase, we ran a couple of learning sessions for participants to create their bots using different approaches. We invited guest speakers from different companies to help and give their insight to the participants to help build the best bot.
Our Product Manager, Anjesh Tuladhar, presented a small gesture of love to our guest speakers, who dedicated their valuable time in interacting and explaining the magic beyond rule-based algorithms to the participants.
Suresh Manandhar, CEO at Wiseyak Inc., gave a session on Algorithm Optimization.
Shreyansh Lodha, a Senior Software Engineer at Cedar Gate Technologies, delivered a session on building Tic-Tac-Toe using Genetic Algorithm.
Rojesh M. Shikhrakar, Manager of Academics at Fusemachines, gave a session on building Tic-Tac-Toe using Reinforcement Learning.
Awards to the Winners
After an overwhelming four-month journey, we finally have our top 3 winners.
The LOCUS Coordinator 2021, Mr Adarsha Bohara and the Chief Technology Officer of Bhoos Games, Mr Ranjan Shrestha, gave the prize to the winners.
Mr Bibek Panthi bagged the first position with a cash prize of Rs. 5 Lakhs.
Mr Rustam Niraula managed to slip into the second position and take away a cash prize of Rs. 3 Lakhs.
Mr Kunjung Sherpa took the third position with the cash prize of Rs 2 Lakhs.
We also had a small ceremony to congratulate and appreciate all our participants and present them with certificates.
In a nutshell, it was a fantastic experience organizing the first-of-its-kind coding challenge in Nepal. We hope this event contributed a little to show that exciting technology is being built here in Nepal and that there are places of refuge for budding software engineers looking for challenging work.
We would like to make this a yearly thing and look forward to collaborating with other companies for the next edition.