Google Hash Code 2019

Hash Code is a coding competition organized by Google where teams from all over the world compete in solving exciting engineering problems.

This is a Google Hash Code 2019 solution: Problem statement.

Disclaimer: The goal of this project was not necessarily to achieve the highest score possible, but to get to know golang and play around with its features. Our solution achieves a score of around 509400, which would be equivalent to about the 1470th place out of 6640 participants.

Build & Run

git clone https://github.com/baurst/go_hc19
cd go_hc19
go run .

By default, the solver will run on all of the following datasets in parallel:

• a_example.txt
• b_lovely_landscapes.txt
• c_memorable_moments.txt
• d_pet_pictures.txt
• e_shiny_selfies.txt

If you would like to solve a subset of the problems, use the flag --datasets for example like so: --datasets b_lovely_landscapes.txt. The tool will create a directory called out and save each solution in a seperate file, reporting the respective score.

Highly subjective takeaways about doing coding competitions with Golang

• due to Golangs small feature set and explicit style, you end up writing slightly more code than you would in Python, C++ or Rust
• this makes good preparation essential: Have your boilerplate ready for data loading, writing solutions and asynchronous problem solving etc.
• the lack of functional programming (map, filter and reduce) negatively impacts coding speed
• the ease with which you can run goroutines asynchronously is just great

Team Members

• Jasmin Kling
• Stefan Baur