Sixty-six students gained direct access to IBM quantum hardware during a recent hackathon hosted by the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computer Engineering of “Gheorghe Asachi” Technical University of Iași. As part of Qiskit Fall Fest 2026, the second edition of the Quantum Hackathon ran from November 6 to 8, giving 15 teams 40 minutes each on IBM quantum processors.

Participants, including students and PhD students, tackled challenges ranging from railway network optimization to DNA reconstruction using Qiskit and QAOA. The event was organized by FreeYa Mind Campus, the first IBM Quantum Innovation Center in Romania, together with IBM Quantum.

Qiskit Fall Fest 2026: Iași Conference on Quantum Machine Learning

Fifteen teams, composed of students and PhD students, tackled two distinct tracks: Quantum Railways and Quantum Genome Detectives, each requiring a blend of theoretical understanding and practical coding skills in Qiskit. The event ran from November 6 to 8, supporting collaboration between participants and mentors from both academia and IBM Quantum. The hackathon’s beginner track, Quantum Railways, tasked teams with optimizing a railway network connecting eight major Romanian cities under budgetary constraints.

Participants encoded these plans as bit strings, formulating an energy model for QAOA to determine optimal routes. More advanced teams, participating in Quantum Genome Detectives, focused on reconstructing chromosomes from fragmented DNA reads by building signed graphs and Ising models, and developing custom QAOA layers. Mentors including Prof. Dr. Radu Strugariu and Andreea-Valentina Arusoaie provided guidance throughout the three-day event, both in person and online.

A pilot high-school track also ran concurrently, engaging students from three local schools in a quantum-based puzzle involving the Palace of Culture clock tower. Awards were presented on November 8 following final presentations and jury deliberation. Team MX4 secured first place in the Quantum Railways track, while Team Toffoli Toffifee topped the Quantum Genome Detectives challenge.

The award in the high-school track went to Qubizzi from Colegiul Național “Costache Negruzzi” for their Quantum GPS concept. Rodica Ioana Lung of Babeș-Bolyai University presented “An Evolutionary Strategy–Inspired Approach to Barren Plateaux Mitigation Using Local Cost Functions,” which was one of the talks featured during the accompanying Quantum Machine Learning & Optimization conference.