10 years ago I won the only hackathon I participated in (not by choice). The jury was especially impressed in our report with the AI section. That part was a bunch of technobabble that I wrote, more or less saying "in the future the system should do this and that", quoting some popular algos from that time. None of it was implemented in our demo in any way, shape or form. They checked that I knew what I was talking about, and talking with confidence was all it took.

We did not even try to win the hackathon, just to get a passing grade.

I mean, this is hardly surprising. Who takes the most points is an accumulative score from subjective opinions(judges, audience, etc.). We didn't win the one in Amsterdam but got second: Around 50 teams began, 20 managed to deliver something, even if the winner is picked at random, that's a 5% chance, which is a very high random chance. When you toss in several senior developers(who at the time worked together in the same company and team), a dedicated frontend developer, ux designer and a few others, second place no longer sounds that impressive, but we all had fun. But to my mind, the value of hackathons is(or rather 'was', given what I said above) forcing people to push their mental abilities to the limits. If being able to write coherent text is good enough to make you the top performer, then we clearly have a problem.