The competition, which aims to promote women's participation in technology, attracted participants from various countries in the region. After advancing past the qualifying round, Ana will travel to Lima, Peru, where she will compete alongside the other nine finalists on October 3, 4, and 5.
The journey to that point had one unusual aspect: Ana spent a good portion of the four-hour competition—during which she had to solve five programming problems—coding from the back seat of a car.
He had started the test at his sister's house in Maldonado, but he had to return before it was over. So he continued working on the problems during the trip, revising his answers and submitting new ones in an effort to improve his score.
A four-hour competition
Ana joined Codificadas on the recommendation of a teacher and some classmates who had also signed up. She was interested in programming competitions, but until then she hadn't had the opportunity to participate in one.
Their preparation leading up to the competition focused mainly on familiarizing themselves with the platform: understanding how to submit a solution, how solutions were evaluated, and what requirements the code had to meet.
The competition took place remotely over the course of four hours. Participants had to solve five problems and could submit new solutions as many times as they wanted in an effort to improve their scores.
Three of the problems had a definite solution. The other two posed a different challenge: they were NP-hard problems, for which the goal was to get as close as possible to an optimal solution.
“That’s when it gets more competitive. At first, you reach 40 out of 100, and then you start closing the gap. Right up until the very end, you can keep tweaking and testing to improve your score,” he explains.
On top of that difficulty came another challenge. At one point, the sheer number of solutions submitted caused the platform to take a long time to return the results.
Ana had to decide whether to keep working on one strategy or try another, without yet knowing how much her previous solution had improved. “It was more a matter of following your intuition,” she says.
Artificial Intelligence to Move Forward Faster
The use of artificial intelligence tools was permitted during Codificadas and was part of its strategy.
When she looked at the rankings and saw that other participants were making rapid progress on the first problems, she decided to use AI to solve the simplest tasks and focus her time on those that required the most optimization.
For the most complex problems, he worked on several alternatives simultaneously, adjusting parameters, testing strategies, and comparing results to determine how to proceed.
For Ana, using artificial intelligence doesn't mean delegating the task of solving the problem. “It doesn't work to just send it something and see what it does, because then it doesn't work and you don't know why.” During the competition, some of the generated responses had compilation errors that she had to identify and fix.
“If I hadn’t had a foundation to understand how everything works, I wouldn’t have been able to do it using artificial intelligence alone. It’s true that it helps you move much faster, but it’s not as if it can do everything on its own.”
Tools developed during the degree program
For Ana, that foundation was built over the course of her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, both through her programming knowledge and the projects and assignments she had to complete during her studies.
Among the courses she most closely associates with what she put into practice during Codificadas are Programming 1, Programming 2, and Data Structures and Algorithms.
“They help you optimize these kinds of problems, reduce the time it takes, and solve them in the most efficient way. I really enjoyed those subjects, and that’s what I applied the most,” he explains.
Also noteworthy is what he learned about using artificial intelligence tools: not just asking for an answer, but understanding how to use them to optimize a process and evaluate the results they produce.
His interest in programming also began to extend to teaching. Last semester, he was a teaching assistant, and this semester he began teaching programming classes.
A competition to encourage more women to pursue careers in technology
"Codificadas" is a regional initiative by Tata Consultancy Services aimed at promoting female talent and expanding women's participation in the fields of technology and STEM disciplines. This year, the competition took it a step further by incorporating artificial intelligence tools, strengthening the participants' abilities to tackle and optimize the resolution of complex problems.
Ana believes it is valuable to have spaces specifically designed to encourage such participation.
“I think that, overall, the proportion of women in technology has increased quite a bit, but we’re still in the minority. I think it’s great that there are initiatives to promote that.”
The Next Challenge: Lima
The next round will be held in person. In October, Ana will travel to Peru to compete against the other nine Latin American finalists.
He doesn't yet know all the details about what the test will entail, but he's already thinking about his strategy. His preparation isn't so much about studying new programming concepts as it is about coming to the test with the right AI tools and environment in place to tackle whatever problems arise.
As she herself explains, the foundation for this isn't built in the weeks leading up to a competition: it's the result of what she's learned and practiced throughout her entire career.
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