Quantum Hackathon

Saturday, October 21
12:00pm-4:00pm (mandatory portion 12:00pm-1:00pm)
Education Building Room L196
🍕Free Pizza Provided🍕

The hackathon will consist of two exciting opportunities to test your quantum skills. Upon successful completion of certain portions of the hackathon, you will earn an official certificate, and the chance to win some awesome prizes (over $300 in total value)!

We will have Qiskit Mentors available throughout the entire session to help you with anything you need! 

Qiskit Challenge Notebooks:

At the start of the hackathon, we will supply you with three Jupyter notebooks that contain skeleton code and an autograder. These challenges are designed to test the skills you learned in the Qiskit 101 session. Each notebook increases in difficulty.

If you attended the Qiskit 101 session, you will be able to at least complete the first challenge notebook. We will have mentors during the event to offer guidance and help debug. The first person to complete all three challenge notebooks automatically wins a prize ($50 value!).

Upon successful completion of each challenge notebook, you will be entered in a raffle for some Qiskit swag and prizes. You can earn up to 6 entries if you complete all three challenge notebooks. Notebook 1 earns 1 entry, notebook 2 earns 2 entries, and notebook 3 earns 3 entries. If you complete at least challenge notebook 1, you will earn the official certificate. Your challenge notebook submission is due on Oct 24 at 11:59pm.

Open-ended Qiskit Quantum Project:

For those who crave more of a challenge, this portion of the hackathon allows you to get creative and submit a Qiskit project of your choosing. This is the perfect opportunity to create a project that you can showcase on your resume and LinkedIn.

Requirements:

• The project must be completed using Qiskit.
• The project must be your own design. You can take ideas from other projects, but plagiarized code, or projects that are too similar to other freely available projects will be disqualified.
• The project must be uploaded to Github. Beginner’s guide to Git. Beginner’s Guide to GitHub.

Successful submission of a project will earn you an additional certificate and the chance to win more exciting prizes and swag! To be eligible for prizes, you must be willing to present your project at the Qiskit Fall Fest Finale on Thursday, October 26 from 6:45-8:00pm. You may still submit your project for a certificate, but you will not be eligible for prizes.

Your open-ended project submission is due on Monday, Oct 23 at 11:59pm. Projects will be judged by the WQCC executive board and a panel of Quantum Computing graduate students. First place will earn the grand prize ($75 value), and runners up will be eligible for other prizes and swag. We will announce winners at the Qiskit Fall Fest Finale on Oct 26. During the finale, you will be given the opportunity to showcase your project to the crowd. The audience will vote on their favorite project, earning the winner a prize! The 1st place winner cannot also win the audience favorite.

Prizes:

• First Place Open-ended Qiskit Quantum Project ($75 value)
• First to complete all Qiskit Challenge Notebooks ($50 value)
• Audience Favorite Open-ended Qiskit Quantum Project ($25 value)
• Raffle prize drawing for Qiskit Challenge Notebook completions and “notable mentions” from the Open-ended Qiskit Quantum Project (~$100 value in total**)
• Random giveaways to all those attending the Qiskit Fall Fest Finale on Oct 26 (~$50 value in total)

**The prizes for the random drawings and notable mentions will be delivered sometime in November. IBM is sending us some swag to give away, and they unfortunately cannot send it any earlier. That’s we bought a bunch of other cool stuff to give away!