Postscript on HackMIT

In 2025, I became likely the only student in high school—and also probably the youngest person—to win HackMIT in its twelve year history. Here, I detail my successful attempt to “hack” HackMIT and my contributions to the hackathon.

I initially applied to HackMIT over the summer of 2025. I noted my experience in electrical engineering, but approached the application as a purely intellectual and philosophical exercise. I mostly detailed my fascination with the spirit of creativity and ingenuity embedded into the fabric of MIT and HackMIT in particular. I noted my careful study of the stories of Sam Bankman-Fried and other inventors, and how I sought to use the hackathon as an opportunity to contribute to Taiwanese–Azerbaijani technologies, a pseudonym for the dual-use technology industry and related megacorporations. Despite the numerous controversial and contentious opinions expressed in my application, it must have been favored by the HackMIT organizing committee, since I was immediately accepted as part of the early decision round. Two of my future teammates, students at MIT, were waitlisted and ultimately rejected, though were allowed to participate through a loophole in the HackMIT regulations. Whether I entered HackMIT by divine providence or a purely meritocratic process I shall never know, but I was determined to bring my ingenuity to bear on the world’s most pressing challenges for the hackathon.

Over the summer, I joined a loosely-associated intellectual collective known as functor.systems, a homotopy-coherent collective of free software hackers. Three other members of this organization, namely Youwen, Ananth, and a hitherto unknown quaternary interlocutor, decided to participate in the hackathon, and I decided to join them in an epic collaboration. I flew in to the MIT campus a few days prior to its start date to preview the full gamut of intellectual exercises on campus. After sitting through lectures in real analysis, fourier transforms, digital circuits, and political economy, I proceeded to synthesize my newfound knowledge into a guiding vision for my team.

Immediately taking my theoretical political economy lessons and putting them to work (mens et manus), I decided to take a radical approach to hackathon labor allocation. Typical and primitive hackathon teams will decide on a singular project idea and commit the synchronized efforts of all four members towards the final product. I immediately identified this as a high point of inefficiency. At this key instant, our team’s triumphant fate was already sealed—it remained only a matter of implementing my machinations.

Let me make a metaphor. Typical teams where all 4 members work on the same project are executing as asynchronous processes in a language such as JavaScript. They depend on each other’s state, namely, the current progress they’ve made. They may be forced to block until the requisite tasks are completed by each other. This drastically reduces efficiency.

In our team, I decided to apply my lessons from political economy and structure our labor such that we operated at the utility-maximizing Pareto frontier. I developed three independent research “thrusts” for our team to focus on. First, Ananth was assigned to theoretical research and development to make full use of his training in the Zardini Lab developing abstractly nonsensical methods for engineering challenges as well as proficiency in Haskell. Second, Youwen was assigned to work on an experimental 3D user interface based on UV mapping as well as research the feasibility of deploying a swarm of artificial intelligence agents. The final research thrust was mine, and it was hardware development and deployment.

In the previous process metaphor, rather than an asynchronous yet blocking set of processes a la JavaScript, we became fully concurrent and purely functional Haskellian processes. Rather than being forced to block on each other’s state, each innovator was free to rapidly deploy experimental designs at breakneck speeds without regard for each other. By giving each member autonomy over research and development, we could emulate the innovative environment of a research university, far more powerful than the corporatist structure of a traditional hackathon team.

As an electrical engineer, incorporating my talents into a mostly software-based project was exceedingly difficult—however, from my extensive literature review, I discovered that there were critical innovations lacking in the augmented reality (AR) space, while the AI agents space was oversaturated with corporate slop. I proceeded to focus my attention on reverse engineering the hardware protocol for a pair of AR glasses that I managed to procure from corporate sponsors. After a few hours of hacking, I established a direct firmware interface with the device and was able to control it flawlessly over a local network. The amount of time it took to set this up was highly nontrivial, and completing a project of this scale under the time constraints was highly restrictive.

Nevertheless, I was able to apply mathematical abstractions to further simplify my tasks and work through the numerous challenges I encountered. With some insight from my teammates and my attendance in a single lecture of an abstract algebra course while on campus, I used the permutation group to create a structured method for debugging the firmware interface. After consulting with our team’s resident category theorist, I developed a novel category–theoretic monadic interface to ensure fault-tolerant communication with the glasses, which allowed a provably optimal deployment of AR directions for maps, which formed the first of three major components in our project.

At this time you may wonder what happened to our 4th unknown interlocutor. Where was his research thrust? Simply put, I had immediately identified him as well to be a suitable yappatron (as he was a double major in the MIT Sloan School of Management), so I sent him to bed early in order to recover full energy for our presentations the following day. This, too, was simply part of the Pareto frontier.

Following a grueling 20-hour hackfest in a Hayden Library study room, we had made vast amounts of progress on each of our research thrusts. Firstly, as I mentioned, I had completed the deployment of AR glasses. This involved the deployment of our own servers within the MIT intranet. I had to procure an MIT domain from MIT IS&T to facilitate the glasses’ operation (side note: did you know it was that easy to get an official MIT subdomain? visit functor.mit.edu).

Second, Ananth had made substantial progress on his theoretical research. He had developed a novel algorithm based on stochastic gradient descent in raw Haskell that would compute a mapping from a 2 dimensional geographic map to an -dimensional surface where the metric distance corresponded to an arbitrary metric. For example, we could compute a “travel-time map” in 3 dimensions (so that humans can interpret it) and warp a 2D map into a 3D version such that the distance between points on the map represents the amount of time it takes to walk/public transit/drive between them rather than physical distance.

There was only a slight problem with Ananth’s project: the code had never actually been ran in the 19 hours prior, as he had been far too busy furiously hacking away. Upon running the code in the 20th hour, all Haskellian safeguard broke down and the code began to spew unintelligible and mangled data. Ananth began despairing and declaring doom for our team. He even suggested the ridiculous idea of “going to bed.”

Unacceptable. Were we about to back down at the last moment? We stood at the precipice of greatness—we were this close to the summit. I had already sacrificed so much (2 days worth of SRVHS classes) to be here in Cambridge. MY NAME IS WARREN “KAITOTLEX” KAITO FUTABA T. LAWRENCE LEX LIN AND I WOULD NOT TAKE ANYTHING LESS THAN FULL AND UNABATED VICTORY. I WOULD REND THE CODE ASUNDER AND FORGE IT BACK TOGETHER INTO A BEAUTIFUL SYMPHONY OF TYPES AND LAMBDAS.

In any case, my division of labor approach was instrumental in our final hour. With just a couple hours left to judging, we had to quickly pivot away from Ananth’s research towards a system that actually worked: Youwen’s swarm of AI agents. While I had been hacking away on the AR glasses and Ananth had been fruitlessly wrangling Haskell types, Youwen had successfully completed the deployment of multiple AI agents that would traverse the streets of Cambridge and go sailing in the Charles. This was essentially our side project in case the main one went awry.

With no choice, I began the integration of our independent research operations. This was the true genius of my plan. At the end, all of our independent research would be synthesized into the one true project that would be even greater than the sum of its parts. I retrofitted my AR glasses to display the thoughts of the AI agents so that you could view the status and thoughts of the agents at all times. We then scrapped Ananth’s project for parts and jerry-rigged it to integrate loosely with the agents to feed the high dimensional embeddings of various metrics into the agents to further embody them. With this, we had finally created our end project: a fully autonomous swarm of AI agents that would rely on our novel space-time embedding system to traverse the world and feed data back to the user in their AR glasses as they walked around.

This final product was far too advanced, despite it being simply our side project. That is, this final project we submitted was simply a random throwaway program that our functor.systems hackathon team created in parallel while the main project was being developed. Our operation at the Pareto frontier was just too powerful such that even our side project still easily cleared out every single other project. Our mysterious fourth teammate returned from his slumber to present our work and after a few rounds of judging we were declared victorious, winning the Grand Prize and highest honor in the entire event. I officially became the first high schooler in (known) history to ever walk away with a HackMIT grand prize, one of, if not the most prestigious awards in collegiate hacking. Warren “Futaba” Lex, signing off.