Thirty-one teams had 72 hours to build software where instability is the feature. System Collapse 2026 ran January 30 through February 2, challenging participants to create systems that become more interesting when they break—cascading failures that reveal hidden patterns, entropy that generates beauty, collapse that triggers evolution. Projects were scored across Technical Execution (40%), System Design (30%), and Creativity & Expression (30%) by 38 engineers across three evaluation batches.
✯ Grand Prize Winners
- 1st Place — Blast Radius (Team: beTheNOOB). A browser-based chaos engineering simulator that visualizes distributed system failure through real-time metrics tracking revenue loss and user frustration. Built with TypeScript, modular components, and a smooth 60fps animation loop. Score: 4.230/5.00. Total winnings: $1,100 (1st Place + Best Technical Execution). "The architecture is well-thought-out with clean component separation and sophisticated state management. The concept of turning distributed system failures into an educational tool is brilliant." — Ishu Anand Jaiswal
- 2nd Place — After the Stroke (Team: Gladiators). An evolutionary drawing web app where strokes persist, decay, and mutate over time, creating emergent glitch art through autonomous system collapse. Built with React/Go stack. Score: 4.211/5.00. Total winnings: $400 (2nd Place + Best Creativity & Expression). "The codebase is solid in architectural alignment between React/Go stack and its self-degrading art vision. I like it!" — Andrei Dzeikalo
- 3rd Place — System Sketch (Team: System Architects). An interactive system design and chaos engineering simulator that creates living architectures—design distributed systems, simulate traffic loads, watch them collapse under stress, and observe self-healing through auto-scaling. Score: 4.080/5.00. Prize: $200. "This is my top pick for utility. The ability to create 'living architectures' that simulate traffic loads and collapse under stress is brilliant." — Amal Mammadov
✯ Category Excellence
- Best System Design: keystone — A game where every action destabilizes the world. Built with Next.js/TypeScript and a custom Canvas 2D engine. Score: 4.33/5.00. Prize: $100.
- Best Creativity & Expression: After the Stroke (Gladiators) — Highest creativity score at 4.44/5.00.
- Best Technical Execution: Blast Radius (beTheNOOB) — Highest technical execution score at 4.20/5.00.
✯ Excellence Tier
- Solo Debugger (Abhinav Shukla) — Debugging as a power fantasy: defeated errors return as shadow particles governed by flocking algorithms. Score: 4.027/5.00
- Fracture (The Broken Being) — AI-driven particle physics sandbox where GPT-4 generates new physics rules in real-time based on destruction patterns. Score: 4.027/5.00
- System Entropy Visualizer (Sanjay Sah) — A simulated OS where entropy drives audio dissonance, UI glitches, and a Tron-inspired 3D visualization. Score: 3.873/5.00
- Universal Simulator (Team Baman) — A geopolitical cascade simulator: trigger sanctions, dissolve alliances, and watch the world fracture in real time. Score: 3.827/5.00
✯ Standout Innovations
- The AZ-5 Protocol (Critical Operators) — Chernobyl-inspired nuclear reactor simulation where small mistakes cascade into larger problems. Score: 3.790/5.00
- State Craft (Girly Pop) — Infinite crafting game with 500+ AI-generated elements and Git-inspired version control. Score: 3.791/5.00
- Residual State (Glitch Permanence) — A system that carries its scars forward, with AI-generated philosophical quotes and persistent mutations. Score: 3.740/5.00
- Garden of Glitch (Nikhil Mallik) — Recursive physics platformer where entropy breaks the game engine and high entropy lets you reach impossible heights. Score: 3.827/5.00
- The Atomic Simulator (TheExperimentalists) — Define attraction, repulsion, and chaos rules, then watch atoms organize, fight, merge, and collapse into emergent patterns. Score: 3.822/5.00
✯ Evaluation Panel
Projects were evaluated by 38 engineers across three batches. The panel included:
- Igor Bulyga — Reddit
- Sergii Demianchuk — Senior Software Engineering Technical Leader, Security & Trust, Cisco
- Artem Atamanchuk — Senior DevOps Engineer
- Dmytro Zaharnytskyi — Software Engineer, Red Hat
- Arun Kumar Elengovan — Director of Security Engineering, Okta
- Roman Kirillov — Lemma-Group
- Shubhankar Shilpi — Engineering Director, Truist
- Alp Arya — KPI Automation
and 30 additional evaluators from across the engineering community.
