About

What was Challenge24?

Challenge24 is used to be an international programming contest between 2000 and 2017, held annually in Budapest. It was an open team contest with no restriction on age, country, profession, programming languages or tools used in solving the tasks. Challenge24 had a few unique characteristics that made it different compared to most programming contests at the time: it had a wide spectrum of tasks ranging from algorithm theory to signal processing, AI, control theory, network programming and more.

Each year had three events: the on-line qualification round ("Electronic Contest", or EC for short) from which the best 27 teams qualified to the finals held in Budapest. From 2010 there as an optional extra round called pre-EC, a week before the EC where teams could test their setup and the submission system solving a few easy, but fun dummy tasks.

The main event was the finals, where each year the best 30 teams teams gathered: the best 27 qualified from the EC and the top 3 finalists from the previous year. The finals started on Saturday morning and ended on Sunday morning. Among the 10..15 tasks, the finals typically featured real hardware control problems and AI-controlling real-time networked games against other teams. When things went well for the organizers, there was a surprise task announced in the 23rd hour - normally made up by the task writer team during the contest, finishing it often seconds before the last hour.

What is Challenge24 retrospect?

Challenge24 de facto ended in 2017. This site is maintained by one of the organizers/task-writers [2010..2014] to pay tribute to the legacy of the contest. The scope is to:

collect and publish the archives as completely as possible, including problem sets and photo/video gallery per year
publish some of the task writers' code from between 2010 and 2014; this includes input generators, our own solvers, the official evaluator code and misc material we used for writing the task
collect and publish auxiliary material, such as writeups, photos, code, links to external pages made by contestants