MATLAB Programming Contest BlogNovember 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. November 12th, 2008nathan q and Edin Win Daylight Rounds 3 and 4Congratulations 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, 2008New video commentary postedDoug 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, 2008Markus Wins the Saturday-Sunday RoundMarkus 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, 2008David Jones is our Friday-Saturday WinnerDavid 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, 2008Contest video commentary: DarknessDoug 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).
nathan q is the Twilight WinnerCongratulations 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. |
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