MATLAB Programming Contest Blog

April 12th, 2006

Final Hours

This MATLAB Contest is almost at an end. The queue closes in four hours at 5PM EDT. At the moment I’m writing this (1PM), the queue is only backed up half an hour and the leading entry isn’t obfuscated, so there is still time to make a change and see the score before the contest ends. I expect the queue to lengthen as we approach the deadline, and soon it will be so long that additional entries won’t be scored before the end of the contest (a sort of reverse twilight where you see everyone’s code but not the scores).

On a side note, congratulations to newcomer Windy Miller and veteran Yi Cao, who both submitted entries this morning that made a significant improvement to the top score.

By Matthew Simoneau

13:10 UTC | Posted in Blockbuster | Permalink |

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

8 Responses to “Final Hours”

  1. the cyclist replied on April 12th, 2006 at 14:01 UTC :

    We seem to be in a calm before the storm.

  2. Alan Chalker replied on April 12th, 2006 at 17:03 UTC :

    Done at last!!!! Now it’s just a waiting game. There are ~360 entries in the queue at 5PM, and given each entry tends to take ~1 min that is 6 hours of processing time. Hopefully we’ll know the results by midnight tonight.

    Although I do note that the last entry is David Jones, submitted 1 second after the deadline?!?!?!?

  3. David Jones replied on April 12th, 2006 at 17:59 UTC :

    My theory is the last entry arrived just before 5:00:00pm when the queue closed, and then took a fraction of a second to get processed, timestamped and stored in the database. Oh what controversy if “poptastic 20″ turns out to be the winning submission!

  4. Matthew replied on April 12th, 2006 at 18:02 UTC :

    The shutoff of the entry submission is somewhat decoupled from the code that actually accepts the entry. The timestamp is what counts.

  5. Stijn Helsen replied on April 13th, 2006 at 02:16 UTC :

    Luckily there is no real point about the 1 second too late. It was far from best anyway.

  6. Markus replied on April 13th, 2006 at 03:58 UTC :

    So it seems that utr alias the cyclist alias Tim Vaughan won his third contest. Congratulations!

    The winning code is an obfuscated one, so far so good. It would be nice if you would let him replace that version by the non-obfuscated, maybe even a well-documented version. I think this would be interesting to the other contestants of this contest as well as for other people who want to review the results of this contest at another time.

  7. Stijn Helsen replied on April 13th, 2006 at 07:23 UTC :

    By using the “Chuck Norris” submission as a reference, and the unobfuscater I’ve submitted (and Matlab’s autoindent) you can get already something.

  8. the cyclist replied on April 13th, 2006 at 10:49 UTC :

    Specifically, take the code of “Chuck Norris 4″ (the unobfuscated version of “”sirroN kcuhC 4″), and substitute my “a37″ function for the “nthroot” function.

    I’m afraid I won’t be providing any documentation for that any time soon. 8-)

Leave a Reply

Wrap code fragments inside <pre> tags, like this:

<pre class="code">
a = magic(3);
sum(a)
</pre>

If you have a "<" character in your code, either follow it with a space or replace it with "&lt;" (including the semicolon).

About

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.

Subscribe

Recent Comments

  • gopal: This is a try
  • Amtu: Well done Alfonso ! Congratulations ! Thanks MATLAB team, I’m already looking forward to the next time.
  • Alan Chalker: Just wanted to post here as well that I think Alfonso should be declared the grand winner since the top...
  • Alan Chalker: Just noticed something curious on the statistics page. While some of the charts are updating correctly,...
  • Ned: To Oliver: There will not be a late stage twilight in this contest. So it’s full daylight right to the end.
  • Oliver Woodford: Much obliged, Mike. For anyone looking for a speed boost to that approach I recommend “Basic...
  • MikeR: I agree with Oliver that if possible making the final few hours of the contest conceal the entries will be...
  • Oliver Woodford: When does late stage twilight begin, and will it then run on until the end of the contest?
  • Alan Chalker: As I traditionally do about this time in the contest, I’ve submitted a heavily commented version...
  • the cyclist: Looks like there might be a problem with the statistics page. For one thing, Alan Chalker holds all 20...

Blog Admin

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