Cubist Systematic Strategies recently hosted its fourth annual hackathon at our New York offices, bringing together 62 students from eight universities for an immersive, two-day competition designed to test their technical rigor and creative thinking under pressure.
The 2026 Cubist Hackathon challenged students to create an AI-powered chess engine, pairing a timeless game with modern machine learning tools. Over 20 hours, teams developed and refined systems that used autonomous workflows to sharpen strategy and decision-making. They trained their models on thousands of historical grandmaster games, designed agentic evaluation frameworks to assess and improve performance, and built polished user interfaces to showcase their work.
After completing their chess engines, students presented them to a panel of judges, who evaluated the creativity and originality of each team’s approach, thoroughness of implementation, engineering choices, and the methodologies they used to leverage AI effectively.
We’d like to congratulate our top three teams, who stood out for their deliberateness in leveraging AI and ability to articulate why they selected specific tools, architectures and techniques. We also extend our thanks to every participant who continues to make this event a success.
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