MLKD PhD student André Carneiro wins first place in Portugal at the Cloudflight Coding Contest

André Carneiro, PhD student at MLKD, and teammate Miguel Galrito, competing as team Strivon, took first place in Portugal in the DATA/AI track of the 42nd Cloudflight Coding Contest, held on 23 October 2026. The team competed at the GLS Portugal site in Lisbon and finished 16th of 383 teams worldwide.

Team Strivon at the prize giving at GLS Portugal, Lisbon.

Teams had four hours to build an AI player for the strategy game Colony: One, which then competed in a live tournament against every other team's AI.

Strivon's entry used reinforcement learning through self-play, the idea behind AlphaZero. Starting from a hand-designed evaluation of positions, a neural network played thousands of games against itself, and each new version was kept only if it beat the previous one.

A match in Colony: One, with the AI's search evaluation on the right.