Santa 2025 - Christmas Tree Packing Challenge

Overview

This hackathon is all about solving a classic optimization problem with a festive twist: figuring out how to pack Christmas tree toys into the smallest possible square box. You'll need to find the best way to fit between 1 and 200 trees for Santa's shipments, aiming for optimal packing to win prizes and earn Rudolph's attention.

Requirements

The challenge requires you to find the optimal packing solution for Christmas trees. For each submission, you need to provide the 'x', 'y' position and 'deg' rotation for each tree. These values must be converted to a string and prepended with 's'. Submissions must avoid overlapping trees and keep location values between -100 and 100. You'll submit a file with 'id', 'x', 'y', and 'deg' in the specified format.

Prizes

There's a total prize pool of $50,000. The first place wins $12,000, second place gets $10,000, and third place also receives $10,000. Fourth place gets $8,000. Additionally, there's a special Rudolph Prize of $10,000 awarded to the team that holds the 1st place on the leaderboard for the longest continuous period during the competition. Prize winners must also provide a detailed write-up of their solution.