MATLAB Programming Contest Blog

April 10th, 2009

Data visualization contest winner

The voting period for the data visualization contest has ended.  We are happy to award the top prize to C Jethro Lam for his entry: Finding the similar entries: a Quantitative approach based on CPU Runtime Behavior.

Congratulation on the winning entry and welcome to the Hall of Fame! Thank you to those that voted for the winner, especially when you had your own entries in the contest!

April 8th, 2009

Voting Period Continues

The deadline has passed for new submissions, but voting continues until Friday at Noon EDT. Browse the list of entries and vote for your favorites by tagging them “vis2009″. Look for the “Published M Files” on the submission’s page to view the entry without having to download the ZIP file.

April 6th, 2009

Rafal Kasztelanic is our Early Bird Winner

By popular vote, Rafal Kasztelanic’s submission, MATLAB Contest - creativity is the winner of our Early Bird award. His visualizations show the authors who contributed the most original lines of code to the contest. We welcome Rafal Kasztelanic, a new contributor to the File Exchange and a new inductee to the contest Hall of Fame. Pulling an equal number of votes, but submitted a couple hours later, is nathan’s meet the family, which tracks evolution and parentage using both code analysis and explicitly credit. Both of these entries remain in the running for the final prize, so follow them in the Rankings and cast your votes accordingly.

April 3rd, 2009

Early-Bird Prize

We will award an Early Bird prize for the entry with the most votes on Monday at noon EDT. For this mid-contest prize, there well be no designated voting period, so entries submitted earlier will have the opportunity to attract more votes.

As explained in the rules, you vote for an entry by tagging it “vis2009″. If you change your mind, simply remove your tag. All entries are listed on the Rankings page. Vote for as many entries as you’d like.

April 2nd, 2009

How to publish your code

With this contest, one of the skills required to enter is the ability to publish code that was written in cell mode.  The seventh video I ever made for my blog was on this subject.  Take a look at this blog entry from 2006 to see how to publish your code.  Remember to include the HTML directory in the .ZIP file that you submit as your entry into the contest.

 http://blogs.mathworks.com/videos/2006/12/05/automatically-generated-reports-from-matlab/

For those of you looking for the exact way to format your code, you can skip ahead to 1:05 into the video.

April 1st, 2009

We’re under way!

The Spring 2009 MATLAB Programming Contest is under way.

As we said, this contest is structured very differently from our usual contests. The complete rules are available here, but in a nutshell, this is an open-ended contest where you are the judge. We want you to look at one very interesting data set and see what kind of insights you can mine from it. The data set in question is one of the most interesting that I know of: the data from one of our previous contests, the Peg Solitaire contest that we ran in May of 2007. I’ve been looking at data from this and other contests for years now, and I’m constantly finding new stories buried in the data. And since many of you actually participated in that contest, you’ll be particularly well positioned to find the good stories hiding in there.

As a side note, you will see a few MathWorkers like me contributing entries during this contest, but we’re not allowed to win any prizes.

March 31st, 2009

New contest starts tomorrow

Tomorrow we will be launching a new contest on data visualization. Its format will be very different from our other contests to date. Look for more information at noon tomorrow (12 PM EDT) when the contest opens.

February 27th, 2009

Army Ants Contest Winners

In case you missed it we posted the Army Ants Contest Winners, along with a background and commentary of each.

November 18th, 2008

Commentary: all King vs. King pairings on actual boards

Doug has posted his commentary showing all possible pairings of the various Kings of the Hill.   See which Kings held up best against all the others.

November 14th, 2008

Fabio C. Wins the Army Ants Contest

The entry processing machine is exhausted. It was a long haul. When the smoke cleared, Fabio C.’s entry was on the top, making him the winner of the Army Ants contest. He joins our other winners, listed in the Statistics, in the MATLAB Contest Hall of Fame.

November 12th, 2008

nathan q and Edin Win Daylight Rounds 3 and 4

Congratulations to our two new winners, nathan q and Edin. Unless these are pseudonyms, they are two new inductees into the Hall of Fame.

We’ve applied the patch suggested by Markus Buehren that will stop entries from failing when the King of the Hill errors. We’re in our final round and near the end of the contest. Good luck!

November 10th, 2008

New video commentary posted

Doug has posted his video commentary showing the first five King Of The Hill entries running on the first three boards.  Watch it here.

November 9th, 2008

Markus Wins the Saturday-Sunday Round

Markus wins this round, followed by SY, pagangod, David Jones, and Nick Howe.

You can now see the rankings for all previous rounds in the statistics.

November 8th, 2008

David Jones is our Friday-Saturday Winner

David Jones is our winner for the Friday-Saturday round and the new King of the Hill. David dominated our last contest, as recorded in the Hall of Fame, and it’s great to see him back. SY, Jan Langer, Alan Chalker, and the cyclist followed him in the rankings, contest heavyweights all.

November 7th, 2008

Contest video commentary: Darkness

Doug has posted his commentary on the first King of the Hill.  It is in video form on his regular Video tutorial blog.  The first four boards are run and commented on.  (Six minutes).

We can’t get the Queue and Top 20 page to refresh. For now, please use this (ugly) page here.
–Matthew

nathan q is the Twilight Winner

Congratulations to nathan q for winning the Twilight round. SY, Jan Langer, Abhisek Ukil, and Andreas Bonelli round-out the top five. We’re now in daylight, where everyone can see all the code, including King of the Hill.

We now have our first round in Daylight, ending tomorrow at noon. We’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the timing details, largely based on feedback we’ve been getting in the newsgroup. We’ve decided to do one daylight round as-is. We’ve been experimenting with some alternative timing metrics based on your feedback, but aren’t yet sure what changes to make. This is a new format, so keep telling us how it’s working out for you.

November 6th, 2008

Jan Langer Wins Darkness

The queue was off to a slow start this morning, but results are now in for the Darkness phase. Jan Langer is our winner! A contest veteran, you can read about his previous contest experiences in the Hall of Fame. He’s followed in the rankings by Nick Howe, SY, Mila Naudé, and Benja&Litos.

Jan’s entry, “ebi v1″, now becomes the opponent that all entries will be tested against until Twilight ends at noon tomorrow. His code will remain hidden, making Twilight especially tricky.

Twilight Begins

We’re now in Twilight, where you can see everyone’s scores but not their code.

The queue is a bit backed up and will take a while more to clear. When we’ve scored all the entries submitted before the noon deadline, we’ll declare a winner, stop the queue, and make their entry the new King of the Hill. All entries submitted Thursday afternoon and before Daylight begins at noon on Friday will be scored against this new “house” ant.

Slight Delay Entering Twilight

We’ll be showing the scores soon. We’ll announce the Twilight winner as soon as we finish processing all the entries submitted before noon.

November 5th, 2008

Army Ants is Up and Running

I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working, so I pulled the CAPCHA for now. The rules are up, so submit away. Darkness ends tomorrow at noon EST, when we award our first mid-contest prize and reveal everyone’s scores. The winner of Darkness will become the “king of the hill” in Twilight.

Army Ants is Live… Almost

The rules are up, but we’re having a bit of trouble with our spam filtering for entries. If it keeps saying your not entering the words correctly, don’t worry, you’re a human. I’ll spend a bit more time trying to debug this, or we’ll remove it completely.

November 4th, 2008

2008 Fall Contest is less that 24 hours away

Can you believe it? It is almost that time again - almost time for our next contest! The contest masters have been hard at work, and as we speak are putting the finishing touches on this season’s challenge.

So, right this minute, go into your calendar and schedule to check back tomorrow after noon Eastern time, to find out what’s in store….

See you all then!

Helen and the MATLAB Central Contest team

May 28th, 2008

Yi Cao breaks 13000!

Yi Cao loves a challenge.

It took a few extra weeks worth of work, but Yi Cao is reporting in the newsgroup that he broke the 13000 barrier. You may recall that Alan Chalker had suggested such a thing might well be impossible. Yi Cao is just the sort of person to find out if it couldn’t be done.

It could. Nice work!

May 8th, 2008

Actual Test Suites Added to File Exchange Submission

Sad to see the queue closed? Have one more idea to try out? Is there some analysis you’d like to perform? Download the updated File Exchange submission and try it yourself. Be sure to share any interesting results on the newsgroup.

May 7th, 2008

Stefan Rach is Our Contest Winner

Stefan Rach is the Grand Prize winner for the Wiring Contest. Like usual, we had a flood of entries here at the end, but when the smoke queue cleared, his entry was on top of the pile. This is the second contest prize that he’s won.

Wrapping up another contest, we’re happy to see all the great feedback coming in on the newsgroup thread. Please keep it coming.


The MATLAB Programming Contest is a semi-annual competition where contestants submit MATLAB code to try to solve a challenge. For more information, see the overview.
  • C Jethro Lam: Thank you for organizing this. I think all entries who participated deserve an award. It’s also a...
  • Cris: I liked the idea for this contest, sadly I didn’t have time to participate. I think it is weird, though,...
  • Tom: Thank you for coming up with a different contest flavor this time! The optimization contests were getting a...
  • Alan Chalker: My last minute submissions were approved, but they aren’t showing up in the rankings. Is this...
  • Alan Chalker: Thanks again to the MathWorks team for holding this contest. It’s a bummer there weren’t...
  • Ken Eaton: Thanks Alan. The weird thing is, I can easily view all the other published files on the FEX without...
  • Alan Chalker: Ken: They show up fine for me. Note, as I pointed out in the newsgroup thread, when you download the...
  • Ken Eaton: I was having a little trouble getting images to appear in my published file. I included some .png files...
  • Matthew: Eric, good point about redundant tags. We’ve implemented a change for this which will go out in the...
  • Matthew: Alan, File Exchange submissions are generally reviewed at least once per business day. During the contest,...

These postings are the author's and don't necessarily represent the opinions of The MathWorks.