This post is part 3 of the QHack 2024 series
After a great week of competition at the QHack 2024 Coding Challenges, we have finally arrived at the beginning of the Open Hackathon! The QHack Open Hackathon is a demanding but fun competition to demonstrate your knowledge and skills, and work together with your teammates to create a unique coding project designed to impress our QHack judging panel. With the limited time available in a hackathon (you must submit your QHack 2024 Open Hackathon project before 5 p.m. ET on 22 February), we are always surprised and amazed by the number and quality of the hackathon projects QHackers complete!
But if you are thinking about participating, the question you may be asking yourself is: what does a good hackathon project look like? And what is taken into account during evaluation? In this blog post we will tell you what we look for in a hackathon project and share our best tips and tricks on how to complete a stellar project — while also having a great time doing it. 😎
Contents
The basics
At a hackathon competition (like the QHack Open Hackathon), you and your team work on developing an idea or creating a prototype project to solve a specific problem. This may sound vague, but a great thing about hackathons is that you have a lot of freedom with your project and you can use whatever innovative approach you come up with to build something cool — within some constraints.
At QHack, we set several hackathon challenges in the field of quantum that are neither too broad nor too narrow; your team picks the one that inspires you the most, and you use whatever software and hardware you can to show us what you can do.
QHack Power-Ups
Remember, if your team does well at the QHack Coding Challenges or submits a great preliminary version of your hackathon project before the Open Hackathon ends, you can win access to some amazing hardware to use during the hackathon! At QHack 2024, NVIDIA and Denvr Dataworks are giving QHackers access to some amazing GPUs, and AWS is giving away tens of thousands of dollars in AWS Credits, so don't forget to express your interest using the QHack Power-Up Form! ✨
For the second round of Power-Ups you also have to submit a preliminary hackathon project via the Challenge portal before 6 a.m. ET on Monday, 19 February.
Hackathon rules
Every hackathon has its own rules and recommendations, but most of the advice we can give you can apply to all of them — great hackathon projects have some important things in common, and if you know what judging panels are looking for, you can easily make your project stand out and look really impressive.
Some great examples
To give you some examples, at QHack 2023 last February, one of our favorite challenges QHackers solved was the QEC and compilation challenge, where teams developed a project related to error correction or circuit compilation that facilitated the execution of circuits on noisy computers.
A good hackathon project often (but not always) uses recently published research or software tools to prototype an interesting application that can be the start of more interesting work in the future. And in last year's Quantum computing today challenge, we asked QHackers to study and implement a quantum computing paper that had been published within the past year — and it turned out to be a very interesting year, indeed!
You can see some of the best hackathon projects at last year's QHack in our QHack 2023 Highlights blog post.
How hackathon projects get scored
At QHack, where hundreds of teams compete for amazing prizes and contact with some of the industry and academic leaders in quantum, it's difficult to create a coding project that really catches our judges' eye with its implementations and results. We start off by looking at some basic criteria.
The main criteria
Our judging panel usually looks at your submitted hackathon projects in several phases and grades them based on the following criteria:
The project is related to the challenge
This may seem obvious, but sometimes we receive projects that have nothing to do with what was being asked for. Sometimes teams start working on an interesting project idea that they are really excited about, but by the time they reach the end of the hackathon, they've forgotten the original challenge and the project had veered off course. In these cases, we might have to immediately discard the project because it doesn't fit the challenge. We try to apply this condition gently, but in some cases excellent projects don't make it to the final stages.
- How to do great: We recommend that you check in with your team as you're working on your project — there is usually not enough time in a hackathon to really plan out your project all the way through and be very strategic about your time and tasks, but if you spend five minutes a day checking that you are still answering the same question that you started with, you are already doing amazingly.
Demonstrated scientific and/or technical capability
This is one of the key criteria. We look for projects that have scientific rigor and clearly and honestly show the results they obtain. Sometimes a more powerful or impressive result may score lower than a simpler one if there is no critical thinking shown to support it. And aspects like creativity and the motivation behind the project idea are also taken into account here.
- How to do great: The best way of doing a hackathon project that demonstrates great technical skills is by working together with your teammates. On your own, one person might be highly skilled in just one thing, but teams where people of various backgrounds and skillsets join to support each other on a single hackathon project can really play off each other's ideas and abilities. Maybe you are fantastic at quantum coding, but you've never used GPUs before — or you're not confident with machine learning algorithms — but with the help of a diverse team, together you can create a uniquely impressive project.
Overall quality of the presentation
To put it simply, the clearer and the easier you make it for the hackathon judges to read and understand your project, the better! A common mistake we often see is teams that upload a ton of files and notebooks as part of their submission, without really telling us how we should go through them. As much as we would love to understand your project, please don't make us do code archaeology. We might miss some of the most interesting parts.
To avoid this problem, this year at QHack 2024, all project information should be delivered in a PDF file — you can (and should) link to your code repository (or anything else), but we expect to see your project description and results in a report.
- How to do great: You've heard it a thousand times already, but we'll say it again: document your code. 😇 You do not have to comment on every single line in every single file, but if you help us understand what you did, we can help you score those big points. Include a readme in your repository, tell us which file does what, leave comments at critical sections, and imagine what kind of help you would need if you were looking at your project submission for the first time. Leave us a guide that will let us retrace your steps, understand what you did, learn about why and how you did it, and (most importantly) show us your awesome results.
Depth of use of (quantum computing) software and hardware
QHack is a quantum computing hackathon, so this score category should be obvious. We love to see your skills and creativity in the use of available tools. Even though much of quantum computing software is free to use, we understand that not everyone has access to everything — so if you are not able to run your code on powerful hardware, this won't disqualify you.
However, hackathons like QHack are an amazing opportunity to try something you've never done before, like using AWS Credits or powering up multiple GPUs using the QHack Power-Ups, and we want to see you use the resources you have to do something really cool. (And you might also impress our sponsors enough to win their special prizes to continue your project, including tens of thousands of dollars in AWS Credits or some amazing GPUs of your own from NVIDIA and Denvr Dataworks.)
- How to do great: At QHack we allow you to use whatever software and hardware works best for your specific project, but we hope to see you do something more exciting than powering up NumPy in a Jupyter Notebook. 😅 A correct handling of quantum computing libraries (whichever you choose) or QHack Power-Ups will help you here and make your hackathon project shine.
Fairness and bias
When a hackathon project reaches a member of the judging panel, they will give it a score based on these basic criteria and add their thoughts and comments to an evaluation file. Something important to keep in mind is that each project passes through the hands of more than one judge, so the final score will be calculated as the average of the scores obtained — and we might discuss our scores if we disagree. This way we avoid reviewer bias and make sure that each project gets evaluated fairly.
QHack 2024 Open Hackathon challenges
And this year, is everything going to be the same at QHack 2024 as in the past? Well, the main evaluation criteria will remain the same, but we have decided to make the hackathon challenges much more specific. Instead of offering you a broad topic like quantum error correction, teams will be asked to compete in much more specific tasks. But don't worry, we won't limit your creativity — there will be many different ways to solve these tasks and you will have plenty of room to apply your favorite ideas.
An example of this can be the freshly published QHack 2024 Open Hackathon challenge The sound of silence, in which teams are asked to find methods or apply techniques that reduce the number of qubits in quantum circuits in interesting and impressive ways. This problem is vital for the ISQ era of quantum computing and there are numerous ways to attack it. For example, you may want to use iterative quantum phase estimation, which reduces the number of estimation qubits to just one, or you might want to study and apply circuit cutting in your project.
If The sound of silence just isn't your thing, you might prefer to dive into embedding methods with Preparing for battle or working with spin systems in A matter of taste. A very interesting challenge can also be the construction of evolution operators in Seeing the future, or maybe you would prefer to research chemical applications by trying the Bridging the gap challenge. There are so many options and we are excited to see what you can do!
Our advice
Some time ago I (Guillermo) was also a QHack participant and, looking at it now, the best piece of advice I can give you is that it is worth it to spend time at the beginning to perfectly define the hackathon project you would like to do. Don't start programming before you are clear about what you want to do and how to do it. For these time-limited projects, planning is super important and it shows in your final results.
So read up on the QHack 2024 Open Hackathon challenges, register your team for the Power-Ups (mind the Power-Up deadlines on 16 February and 19 February and the final submission deadline on 22 February), come up with something awesome, push your ideas to the limit and become one of the QHack winners. We can't wait to see your final projects! 💖
About the authors
Guillermo Alonso
Quantum Scientist specializing in quantum algorithms
Ivana Kurečić
🐢 Focused on the adoption and implementation of innovative technologies