Projects

Each year of the Orthogonal School includes a team project that accompanies students throughout the entire learning journey. The teams, formed at the beginning of the year, work independently by applying the skills acquired during the lessons. The program culminates in a final tournament in which the teams compete to win prizes and special recognitions.

Hive Bot

The goal of the project is to develop a bot that plays Hive, a modern abstract strategy game in which each piece has behavior inspired by insects. Hive has a growing competitive scene and an annual world championship, yet there is still no superhuman bot.

Teams consist of two or three students and have complete freedom over the bot’s architecture: the deliverable is a Docker container, and teams are limited only by the machine on which it will run (equipped with a GPU). Each team also receives a €500 budget for cloud resources, which they may use as they see fit.

The bots developed during the year compete in a summer championship. The top two teams qualify for the live final, held at Boost in September, where the awards ceremony also takes place. The development guidelines for the bot can be found here.

2024/2025 Tournament

Final: BeeSearch vs AntElligence 6 – 0

Regular Season Standings: Top 5 teams out of 9
Round robin · 3 points for a win · 1 point for a draw

	Team		PTS

1	BeeSearch	Alessandro Dario, Simone Moretti	48

2	AntElligence	Matteo Canton, Francesco Visonà	40

3	BeeLieve	Dario Moschetti, Marco Simoncini	37

4	Hivemind	Riccardo Chimisso, Alberto Vendramini	27

5	BeeBot	Giulia Beraldo, Silvia Mondin	27

Other teams: HAIve, HexaLogic, NeuroHive, StrHive to Fly

2025/2026 Tournament

Nearest Neighbors Challenge

The Nearest Neighbors Challenge is the second-year project of the Orthogonal School. Teams compete on a research and optimization problem related to nearest neighbor search, one of the fundamental challenges in computer science and machine learning. The goal is to design efficient and creative solutions, putting the skills acquired throughout the program to the test.

As in the first year, participants are provided with rules, reference datasets, links to resources, and development documentation.

2025/2026 Tournament

Awaiting tournament results