MATLAB Programming Contest BlogNovember 12th, 2009Alfonso is the winner!Congratulations to Alfonso Nieto-Castañón, whose impressive breakthrough code lasttry01 pulled ahead of the crowd in the final minutes. MikeR was clever enough to know that Alfonso had a good chance of slipping into the lead, and he was lucky enough to have the computer run just a little bit faster when he resubmitted Alfonso’s code, but since it’s an exact clone (take a look at the official diff between lasttry01 and A27), we have no qualms about awarding the grand prize to Alfonso. Well done! Thanks everyone for playing, and we look forward to seeing you next time. November 11th, 2009Contest is closedThe contest is now closed. As many of you noticed, the entry submission door was left open for a while, but it’s closed now. Don’t worry… any entries that arrived after 12 noon Natick time will be disqualified. At the current rate of entry evaluation, it looks like we’ll have an official winner sometime after midnight Eastern Standard Time. In the meantime, if you want to make sure the queue is healthy, the Contest Status Twitter account is a good tool to consult. Also, while the contest is fresh in your mind, please visit our UserVoice page to help us make the next contest even better. Thanks for playing, everyone! SY Wins the 1000 Node ChallengeSY submitted the entry that won our 1000 Node Challenge. Congratulations! If one of your contributions were part of this entry, please leave a comment and let everyone know. We’re now in the final stretch. The queue closes at noon on Wednesday. Good luck. November 10th, 20091000 Node ChallengeOur final mid-contest prize will go to the best-scoring entry with fewer than 1000 nodes submitted before 6PM ET on Tuesday. We’ll keep a list of the top-scoring entries in the statistics, but remember that this listing is delayed a bit. November 9th, 2009MikeR Wins the Sunday PushMikeR made the largest cumulative improvement to the score on Sunday winning the Sunday Push, followed by Abhisek Ukil, SY, and Alan Chalker. November 8th, 2009Nick Howe (!) Wins the Saturday LeapNick Howe locks up yet another mid-contest challenge, the Saturday Leap. One of his entries made the biggest single improvement in score on Saturday. Gwendolyn Fisch, MikeR, Jan Langer, and Alan Chalker also made big single-entry improvements to the score. Speaking of Alan Chalker, don’t miss his comments on the contest and his commented submission. We’ll again award a Sunday Push for the the contestant who makes the biggest cumulative improvement to the score today. To track the progress (20 minutes delayed), see “Best per Phase > Contributions in Daylight > Sunday” in the statistics. Some interesting ideas have been contributed on the UserVoice forum. Check them out, vote up the ones you like the best, and contribute one of your own. November 7th, 2009Nick Howe Wins the Early Bird SpecialNick Howe is back! He’s taken (ordered?) the Early Bird Special by submitting the best entry before the 8PM deadline, our first mid-contest award in Daylight. Our next prize is the Saturday Leap, awarded to the contestant who makes the biggest single improvement to the score between midnight and midnight Eastern Time. You can track the leaps via the statistics. By the way, we’ve created an event for the MATLAB Contest on Facebook. If you’re participating in the contest, or even just watching, you’re welcome to RSVP for the event or just “like it“. November 6th, 2009Your Contest FeedbackAt the risk of over-taxing our ancient database, we’ve enabled live updating of the “Queue and Top 20” pages. Hopefully this will reduce confusion about missing entries and improve the interactivity of the contest. The contest runs on a set of old Perl (frontend) and MATLAB (backend) code, most of which is about 10 years old now. Fortunately, this spring we’re planning to rewrite the contest to use the same modern web architecture that runs the rest of MATLAB Central. This is an opportunity to make some significant improvements, or at least create a better platform for doing so in the future. We have our own wishlist, sculpted by all the feedback we’ve received over the years, but we’d like to try an experiment. We’ve set up a forum to collect your feedback about the MATLAB Contest on UserVoice. We encourage you to login and contribute a new idea, or just vote up the ones you like. Obviously, we won’t be able to act on all the feedback we receive, but your input will help us prioritize. Early Bird SpecialWe’re now in Daylight and everyone’s code in visible. To get things rolling, we’ll award an Early Bird Special to the best-scoring entry submitted before 8PM Eastern. Good luck! Small Rule Tweak: Limit to Vector LengthTo keep entries which return really long colors vector from slowing down the queue, we’ve capped the length of each at numel(board). Anything longer than that will be ignored. We’ve updated the rules and the submission to reflect this. This updated submission will score your entries faster, thanks to an optimization from David Hruska. Oliver Woodford wins TwilightOliver Woodford is the winner of the Twilight phase of the contest and a new inductee into the Hall of Fame. The next five finishers are Per Rutquist, Nick Howe, Greg S, Survion, and Nieto-Castanon. It’s great to see some new faces joining our old friends. You can see the complete rankings for the first two phases of the contest in the statistics. November 5th, 2009Keeping track of the contest with TwitterThe contest queue page is currently operating on a 20 minute refresh rate. We’re working on speeding that up, but you can use Twitter to get up-to-the-minute news on how the contest is going. We’ve created two Twitter accounts.
For your viewing convenience, I’ve created a Twitter list that merges these two feeds into one place here: Contest Feeds. Nick Howe Wins DarknessNick Howe submitted the best entry in the Darkness phase of the contest. A contest veteran, you can read about his previous contest experiences in the Hall of Fame. He’s followed in the rankings by Greg S, Per Rutquist, Anders, Survion, and WillDampier. November 4th, 2009Color Bridge Contest is now under wayThis Fall’s contest is based on the game Flood-it. As usual, we are starting out in Darkness moving into Twilight, then Daylight. The contest will run until next Wednesday, November 11, 2009, high noon (Boston time). Links to get started:
Enjoy! Helen and the MATLAB Central Contest Team October 16th, 20092009 Fall Contest: November 4 - 11Psst, have you heard? The next MATLAB contest will be held November 4th through 11th. By popular demand, we’re returning to the traditional contest format. We think that the new game will be fun for everyone, so make sure you note the date in your calendar. See you there! Helen and the MATLAB Central Contest Team April 10th, 2009Data visualization contest winnerThe 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, 2009Voting Period ContinuesThe 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, 2009Rafal Kasztelanic is our Early Bird WinnerBy 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, 2009Early-Bird PrizeWe 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, 2009How to publish your codeWith 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, 2009We’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, 2009New contest starts tomorrowTomorrow 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, 2009Army Ants Contest WinnersIn case you missed it we posted the Army Ants Contest Winners, along with a background and commentary of each. November 18th, 2008Commentary: all King vs. King pairings on actual boardsDoug 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, 2008Fabio C. Wins the Army Ants ContestThe 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. |
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