More than 150 high school students attended the activity “The Roots of Software”, on the occasion of the Science and Innovation Week, an initiative from the Comunidad de Madrid, coordinated by the Knowledge Foundation Madri+d, aimed at introducing young talents to software research through challenges, games and videos. A different way of disseminating the science of the IMDEA Software Institute, promoting STEM vocations and attracting future promises.

The director of the Institute, Manuel Carro, was in charge of opening the event and welcoming the students. After him, a promotional video was presented. It tells in a direct and impressive way, the work that is done in software research.

Once the video broadcast was over, the pre-doctoral researchers Silvia Sebastián and Pedro Valero, began to tell what they do and quickly moved on to the games that entertained young people for more than two hours.

They taught the students how problems can be solved faster thanks to parallelization, with sums of large numbers in parallel. Several volunteers were invited to go out on the whiteboard and try to solve the equation in the shortest possible time. In addition, they explained that when working in parallel, it is necessary to coordinate the processes (concurrence). In this sense, the students successfully tried to solve the problem of the philosophers’ dinner.

Cryptography was also present, Silvia and Pedro hid a report and the attendees had to break the encryption to know its location.

Another themes of the games were formal systems, the turing test to differentiate humans from machines and finally they used the Kahoot tool so that the young people could vote if the people from the images and videos that were shown to them were fruit of an artificial intelligence or human.

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