Mason Abrell ’22 Leads His Team to Win the 2024 MIT Quantum Hackathon!
Congratulations to Mason Abrell ’22, a rising junior at Yale University, who led a five-man team to win the 2024 MIT Quantum Hackathon, sponsored by Moody’s!
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 could develop and test their code on real quantum hardware, and a virtual hackathon for a larger outreach of over 1000 hackers.
Mason’s team described the February 2-4 contest, "Our challenge was to build a quantum portfolio optimizer from start to finish, an algorithm to interfacing with real cutting-edge quantum hardware. Most of the field of Quantum Computing is focused on theory and theoretical applications. Still, 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 extremely fulfilling! 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."
The 1st place prize includes a white paper jointly published with Moody's and an interview for a summer quantum computing internship! Congrats Mason!
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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 could develop and test their code on real quantum hardware, and a virtual hackathon for a larger outreach of over 1000 hackers.
Mason’s team described the February 2-4 contest, "Our challenge was to build a quantum portfolio optimizer from start to finish, an algorithm to interfacing with real cutting-edge quantum hardware. Most of the field of Quantum Computing is focused on theory and theoretical applications. Still, 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 extremely fulfilling! 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."
The 1st place prize includes a white paper jointly published with Moody's and an interview for a summer quantum computing internship! Congrats Mason!
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