How a Student Team Won Huawei’s Global Software Challenge with Edge‑Node Optimization

In 2022, the 8th Huawei Software Elite Challenge – “Planck Project” – held its finals and award ceremony in Shenzhen, attracting 826 universities, 3,291 teams, and over 20,000 students worldwide. After regional preliminaries, semifinals, and a global final, the team “We Know Nothing” from the Guangdong‑Hong Kong‑Macao region emerged as the champion.

Motivation : The team entered the competition simply to test their coding abilities and gauge the gap between themselves and top developers, aiming to learn and improve.

During the early rounds, they endured intense discussions, coding sessions, and countless revisions, submitting code over 20 times. A breakthrough came after a night of rest, reinforcing the lesson that a rested mind fosters innovation.

Through continuous optimization, the team advanced from tenth place in the preliminaries to the global finals, ultimately securing first place after strategic score reductions and careful debugging.

Technical Solution : The global final introduced a change where, at each time step, participants could select any 20 edge nodes from site_bandwidth.csv. The cache overlay ratio for the previous time step’s bandwidth usage was reduced from 5% to 1% (floor). The team exploited the non‑billing 5% time slots by selecting edge nodes with the highest bandwidth at each step, filling those slots, and increasing the number of selected nodes to lower overall cost. By expanding the selection from 20 to up to 50 nodes, they reduced the total cost to 790,000, achieving the best score.

The final answer simply required choosing, for each time step, the 20 edge nodes with the largest bandwidth, which guaranteed inclusion of all nodes exceeding the 95th‑percentile bandwidth threshold.

The experience taught the team the importance of perseverance, teamwork, and believing in miracles, echoing the sentiment that miracles happen when you truly expect them.