MIT Hackathon Winner
Mason Abrell (‘18), a second-year student at Yale University, joined a five-man team to win Moody’s Quantum Hackathon at MIT.
Held on MIT’s campus in Cambridge, MA, the event included a 300 student in-person hackathon to explore applications of near-term quantum devices where students got to develop and test their code on real quantum hardware, and a virtual hackathon for a larger outreach of over 1000 hackers.
Abrell’s team described the February 2-4 contest, "Our challenge was to build a quantum portfolio optimizer from start to finish, algorithm to interfacing with real cutting-edge quantum hardware. Most of the field of Quantum Computing is focused on theory and theoretical applications, but this challenge put the power of a qubit into our palm and asked us to produce real, physical results. Interweaving the economic theory of portfolio optimization with the physics-based capabilities of our quantum annealer was by no means an easy task, but it was an extremely fulfilling one. Seeing a real quantum computer applied to a real and pressing problem, with great success, redoubled our enthusiasm for the field and its potential to revolutionize how we problem-solve. A combination of hard work, innovative thinking, and a lot of coding led to our winning algorithm, which used quantum annealing to solve QUBO formulated mean-VaR portfolio optimization problems."
Congrats to Mason, Matt and Jeanette Abrell too!
Mason (at left) with his winning team
Participants at the Even