ISLAMABAD – Fuelled by caffeine, pizza and adrenaline, sleep-deprivedprogrammers in a marathon Saudi contest this week explored high-techsolutions to prevent a repeat of past calamities in the annual hajjpilgrimage.

In a cavernous hall in the Red Sea city of Jeddah, thousands of softwareprofessionals and students competed in the kingdom´s first-ever hackathon,a coding festival ahead of the world´s largest pilgrimage later this month.

The hajj, expected to draw more than two million pilgrims to Makkah thisyear, represents a key rite of passage for Muslims and a massive logisticalchallenge for Saudi authorities, with colossal crowds cramming intorelatively small holy sites.

Launching headlong into 36 hours of software development, the participantsfrom across the globe battled sleep deprivation to crowd source answers toa key question that has long vexed hajj organisers — how to avert futuredeadly disasters.

A group of five Saudi, Yemeni and Eritrean women, all in their 20s andcovered head-to-toe in the Islamic niqab, hunched over their laptops todesign an app for paramedics to speedily reach people in need of medicalattention using geo-tracking technology.

If multiple emergencies arise at once, the women hoped their app would helpprioritise the most pressing cases.

Two Pakistani professionals paired up with two East Asian students todevelop a “virtual leash” application to locate relatives lost in the seaof humanity by using bluetooth wristbands.

Four Saudi men sought to design sensors for garbage bins that would alertcleaners when they are full to avert any hygiene scare.

And another group of Saudi women scrawled algorithms and programming codeson a whiteboard to design an app to help non-Arabic speakers translateinstructions into multiple languages without an internet connection.

With nearly 3,000 programmers — who ate and slept at the venue –organisers said Saudi Arabia had broken the Guinness World Record for thelargest number of participants at a hackathon.

While their solutions are still untested, the event, which ended on Fridayand offered cash prizes of around two million riyals ($533,000), was billedas an invention marathon by organisers.

“We aim to upgrade the experience of hajj for all pilgrims from all overthe world,” said Nouf al-Rakan, chief executive of the Saudi Federation forCyber Security and Programming, which organised the event.

“This (hackathon) will enrich that experience, will give us plenty ofsolutions and ideas that we can actually adapt and invest in,” she told AFP.