With this crazy volume, it was infeasible to rank or even shortlist the best projects with human review. On the other hand, AI scoring against a rubric led to disappointing results.
In an effort to surface and spotlight the best projects, I built MetaArena (https://meta-hackathon.com/). It compares just two projects head-to-head, let's you pick which you thought was the stronger project, and places them on a leaderboard using the same algo platforms like LLMArena and DesignArena use to rank AI models (Bradley-Terry).
Check it out, at the very least I hope you find a cool project or two here that inspire you. Lmk if you have any feedback on the arena/leaderboard!