HKUST CSE Alumnus Max Chui Crowned AWS AI League Hong Kong Champion, Set to Compete on World Stage at re:Invent 2026

Max Chui (BEng in Computer Science (COMP), Class of 2022), an alumnus of the HKUST Department of Computer Science and Engineering, has been crowned Champion of the AWS AI League at AWS Summit Hong Kong—the first time the prestigious tournament has been held in the city. Competing against teams from some of Hong Kong's largest enterprises on 17 June 2026 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, Max outpaced the field in a high-intensity, three-hour build challenge to claim the title and earn a fully sponsored trip to the Global Championship Grand Finale at AWS re:Invent 2026 in Las Vegas.

A Tournament Built for the World's Best Builders

The AWS AI League is Amazon Web Services' flagship competitive AI programme, run as a gamified tournament featuring live leaderboards, timed challenges, and real-time scoring. The 2026 Championship offered two tracks: the Agentic AI Challenge, where participants build an intelligent autonomous agent using Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and deploy it into a maze-style environment requiring multi-step reasoning and task execution; and the Model Customization Challenge, which tasks competitors with fine-tuning foundation models for specific domains using Amazon SageMaker AI.

The Hong Kong tournament drew a strong field, including enterprise teams from Cathay, Manulife, Octopus, Crypto.com, and Lalamove, alongside individual developers. The top performer earns a place at the Global Championship at AWS re:Invent—the largest cloud computing conference in the world, drawing more than 60,000 in-person attendees and 300,000+ online, with 2,200+ sessions across the Las Vegas Strip.

A Multi-Agent Solution Built in Three Hours

Max competed in the Agentic AI Challenge, constructing a sophisticated multi-agent orchestration system from scratch within the three-hour window. At its core was a "Dungeon Game Orchestrator"—a supervisor agent built on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore—that dynamically routed each in-game encounter to the appropriate resource: a Pathfinding Lambda for movement decisions, specialist sub-agents for complex challenges, and a memory system for tracking challenge types and routing history.

Several technical decisions proved decisive. Max engineered structured, rule-based prompts using explicit DO / DO NOT / MUST instructions and included a "no human is listening" framing to prevent the agent from asking clarifying questions—each of which cost a life in the game. He replaced unreliable large language model guesses with deterministic tools, including a Python-execution Lambda that correctly computed the 500th Fibonacci number modulo 10¹⁰—a calculation that an LLM would likely hallucinate—and a WebResearcher sub-agent capable of fetching live web pages for research questions. Crucially, he also turned guardrails into a scoring lever: identifying that one challenge was won not by answering an adversarial prompt, but by blocking it entirely, mirroring how responsible real-world AI agents are designed.

"This challenge gave me much deeper insight into how companies can build their own agents with guardrails and memory," said Max. "It was also intensely competitive—scores could swing dramatically with each change. I wasn't even on the first page of the leaderboard with 11 minutes left, and I was still optimising right up to the final minute. Pulling it off in those last moments made the win especially satisfying."

The HKUST CSE Foundation

Max credits the HKUST CSE curriculum with building the problem-solving instincts that proved essential under competitive pressure. He points in particular to COMP 2012H: Honors Object-Oriented Programming and Data Structures, taught by Dr. Desmond Tsoi—as instrumental in developing a structured, methodical approach to breaking down unfamiliar problems.

"More than any single course, the CSE curriculum as a whole built an intuition for problem-solving," Max reflected. "The intensity of the honours track meant that the high-pressure, time-boxed nature of the competition actually felt manageable by comparison. I'm proud to represent HKUST CSE on the global stage."

Hong Kong on the World Stage

As Hong Kong champion, Max has earned a fully sponsored trip to compete at the AWS AI League Global Championship Grand Finale at AWS re:Invent 2026, held from 30 November to 4 December in Las Vegas. There, he will go head-to-head against champions from AWS Summits around the world, with finalists showcasing their agents live in front of the re:Invent audience. The competition carries a US$50,000 prize pool and the title of AWS AI League Champion.

The Department of Computer Science and Engineering congratulates Max on this outstanding achievement and wishes him every success as he represents HKUST—and Hong Kong—on the industry's biggest stage!

CSE graduate Max Chui wins inaugural Hong Kong tournament with a last-minute comeback, earning a fully sponsored berth at the AWS re:Invent 2026 Global Championship in Las Vegas.