Ericsson Programming Championship

Challenge

Ericsson is a world leader among telecommunication technology service provider companies and our country, Hungary has a significant role in its life since Ericsson Hungary is operating as an R&D center. Thanks to this position, the company continuously seeks programmers and developers which is an outstanding opportunity for fresh graduates or university students.

Solution

The competition is an exciting element of the recruiting process is the Ericsson Programming Championship, it was first organized in 2011. Since then it has become a success story both from the students' and our partner's point of view because more than 100 teams register to participate in the championship every year.

In 2017, the competition became more open, as the high-school and university students, and professional participants could code not only in C++, but in the language they preferred (C, Java or Python).

In 2018

In the first round the contestants used artificial intelligence to control Pac-Man in the maze. Their task was to collect all points while avoiding getting caught by the ghosts.

The teams who qualified for the second round faced a challenge with multiple tracks, where they had to compete against each other and the smarter ghosts. The 12 teams who made it to the final raced against one another for the victory.

The competition was conducted entirely online through an application developed for the game. On this web-based application they could write and test their code while seeing how their own Pac-Man moves on the display. During the competition contestants translated 40 000 codes in total. 

In 2019

In the first round the contestants used their codes to change the state of routers in the server room with the goal to set it in a way that it prefers their data packages. In the second round the teams had to face the difficulty that they were not the only ones setting up the routers. The top 12 teams (10 student+2 senior teams) made it to the final, where they had to compete against each other for the victory.