On Friday, 27 September 2019, the European Researchers’ Night “Research for us all” took place in Vienna at the University of Applied Arts. The logicians of the TU Vienna demonstrated the outstanding quality of their EU-funded research by means of a pen-and-paper game and thus promote computational thinking. By playing this game, you can experience up close how an efficient algorithm is developed, without a computer, almost as a board game.

At more than 60 stations the visitors got to know the spectrum of science – also in the field of logic and algorithms. The logicians of the Faculty of Computer Science at Vienna University of Technology, such as Agata Ciabattoni, Georg Gottlob, Laura Kovacs, Matteo Maffei and Stefan Szeider, all lead projects funded by the European Research Council or Horizon 2020, Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. The European Researchers’ Night is held simultaneously throughout Europe. Thanks to EU funding, projects and public events have been realised in a total of 371 cities. These are intended to bring research and the public closer together, point out the diverse possibilities of science and, in particular, make the influence on our daily lives visible.

Catch the virus

The visitors of our station “Fang das Virus” could play the analog game “Fang das Virus”, which is based on the Cops and Robbers Game (Seymour and Thomas 1993) and which was specially adapted by Professor Stefan Szeider. In addition, the visitors were informed about other activities of the project ADA, such as the Hackathon for good AI and the CS Unplugged.

In the game ‘Catch the Virus X13’ a virus hides in a computer network which is used for the analysis of medical data about organ transplantation. X13 must be caught with bots to prevent it from damaging this data. How many bots are needed to catch the virus?

The game can be played at home almost like a board game. Download the diagrams and rules here.

Invitation to virtual hackathon fro Good AI part of project ADA	Showcasing the T-Shirt from the kick-off event of Project ADA – world largest sorting network	How to play the game “Fang das Virus”
Ambassador of Austrian #CodeWeek Andrea Mayr-Stalder playing the game with Thomas Pani, TU Wien	This was the station Fang das Virus at Sci4All 2019