ubhacks-project

Gameplay example

ubhacks-project

_ buffsort _

Our project's goal was to get people to perform mergesort in a distributed fashion. By allowing each person to make one simple computation, such as "6 or 3, which is smaller?" they can make small contributions to a complicated sorting task.

We made it into a game in which multiple teams compete to see who will sort their array the fastest and the most accurately. The live sorting progress for each team is presented on graphical tree diagrams which one can view on a web page.

We were originally trying to decide between making a hardware based or software based solution, and in the end settled on this because of the learning opportunity it provides in helping teach how sorting various algorithms like merge sort work and visualize how they work in nlog(n) time.

We used JavaScript and React for the web interface displaying the game and used MongoDB as a database to store the data at any given time. Loopback was used as a backend framework.

We faced multiple challenges along the way, especially when it came to connecting the server; however, after realizing the way we were connected to the internet was affecting our database connection, and with a lot of careful research on the usage of the databases, we got it to work.