Halite AI Hackathon with Two Sigma, OxAI & CodeSoc

Halite Hackathon

Thursday 17th January, from 3-8pm

The Oxford Foundry
3-5 Hythe Bridge Street
Oxford
OX1 2EW

OxAI, CodeSoc & The Oxford Foundry invite you to an AI Hackathon on Thursday, 17th of January, 3pm to 8pm, at the Foundry. The event will be a fun and interactive way to improve your coding skills, tackle an interesting AI problem and learn about the use of AI in the financial industry. There will be free pizza, refreshments & prizes for winners.

What is the Halite AI Challenge?

Halite is Two Sigma’s annual open source AI programming competition, organized around an original multi-agent game. Participants write bots in their preferred programming language and submit them to the Halite environment, where they play against bots written around the world. Since 2016, nearly 10,000 people have played Halite; last year alone saw participants from more than 100 countries playing in over 20 programming languages.

The Halite III game has a resource management premise, simple rules and a branching factor higher than that of the game of Go. Players build bots that navigate ships around an ocean map collecting an energy resource. Thousands of participants have joined in in the first months of the challenge, applying techniques ranging from simple heuristics to sophisticated machine learning. Visit https://halite.io/ for more information.

Who is this for?

The event is open to all Oxford students, undergrad as well as graduate. We envision three types of people that would particularly benefit from the event.

• You are a STEM student with an interest in solving complex problems with code. You would like to learn about AI and hone your skills.
• You conduct research or have an active interest in AI development and like to work on the limits of artificial intelligence. You are looking for a hard problem and would like to learn how others tackle it.
• You are a Social Science or other non-technical student who likes to work on difficult problems in a team. You would like to ideate and devise clever strategies.

Prizes and Free Food

The team that builds the best bot will win a trip to London to visit the Two Sigma office. There are also prices for the runner up teams

Two Sigma presence at the Hackathon

Learn from Two Sigma engineers about life at Two Sigma, the design principles guiding Halite's development, the technical challenges of running a global AI competition, and observations from this year’s iteration.

About Two Sigma

Two Sigma is an investment management firm that follows the principles of technology and innovation to find value in the world's data. Since its founding in 2001, Two Sigma has built an innovative platform that combines extraordinary computing power, vast amounts of information, and advanced data science to produce breakthroughs in investment management, insurance and related fields. For more information, please visit www.twosigma.com.

** FOR UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD STUDENTS ONLY **

Undergraduates – Postgraduates - DPhil candidates

STUDENT IDS WILL BE CHECKED ON THE DOOR. Please bring your Bodleian card with you.

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