UCL team wins Anthropic prize after simulating hackathon with AI agents
A team at the UCL AI Festival hackathon has simulated an entire event using autonomous AI agents, recreating participant networking, team formation, mentoring, and project development inside a virtual pixel-art office.
Tomáš Hrdlička, a Research Engineer at MockAI and UCL Computer Graphics, Vision and Imaging MSc graduate, shared details of the build on LinkedIn following the weekend event. The team scraped LinkedIn and GitHub profiles of participants and mentors, then spawned more than 100 personalized AI agents to “let the hackathon play itself.”
The project won the Anthropic prize for best use of the Claude Agent SDK at the AIEngine-organized hackathon, part of the first UCL AI Festival.
Simulating collaboration with AI agents
According to Hrdlička, the agents were designed to network, identify complementary skills, form teams, and build functional projects autonomously. Mentors were simulated walking the floor and giving feedback. “We simulated an entire hackathon with AI agents,” Hrdlička wrote on LinkedIn.
“At the UCL AI Festival hackathon (AIEngine) this weekend, we scraped every participant and mentor's LinkedIn and GitHub. We then spawned over 100 of them as autonomous AI agents with personalised avatars in a pixel art office.
And let the hackathon play itself.”
He added: “The agents networked, found complementary skills, formed teams, and built functional projects - all on their own. The mentors walked the floor giving feedback.”
The team built the system in 24 hours and was awarded the Anthropic prize for best use of the Claude Agent SDK.
AIEngine and the build-focused agenda
The hackathon formed part of the opening two days of the UCL AI Festival, which is hosted by UCL Innovation & Enterprise in partnership with NVIDIA and HPE. The event combines a two-day build-focused hackathon with research-led sessions across healthcare, climate, robotics, and large language models.
More than 150 participants took part in the hackathon segment, organized by AIEngine and supported by industry partners including AWS and Anthropic. Winners receive tickets and funded travel to NVIDIA’s GTC AI conference in San Jose.
Hrdlička said the demo resonated with attendees, particularly the ability to search for oneself and see a personalized avatar that “actually looks like you and talks about things you would.”
Agent ecosystems move into education spaces
The simulation raises questions about how multi-agent systems could be used beyond demo environments. While hackathons traditionally focus on human collaboration under time pressure, the build suggests similar dynamics can be modeled and iterated in silico.
UCL positions the AI Festival as a platform for connecting research and entrepreneurship. Professor Geraint Rees, UCL Vice-Provost of Research, Innovation & Global Engagement, says: “The UCL AI Festival highlights the tremendous power and potential of AI to revolutionise so many areas of business and research. From developers creating innovative tools to solve persistent problems, to researchers using it to answer the unanswered questions, it’s a technology whose importance is only going to increase. UCL is a global leader in AI innovation, highlighted by its strong partnerships with NVIDIA and HPE.”
Utz-Uwe Haus of HPE says: “AI is accelerating the pace and scale of research and innovation, unlocking unprecedented opportunities across healthcare, climate science, robotics, and beyond. The UCL AI Festival exemplifies this momentum by bringing together diverse experts and entrepreneurs, showcasing how they harness the latest AI technologies. Simultaneously, it provides a forum to explore the strategic responsibilities that come with them as the public debate is shifting from size and performance of AI supercomputers to that of sovereignty and control.”
The four-day festival ran from 28 February to 3 March in central London, and brought together researchers, founders, and infrastructure partners across the UK AI ecosystem.
