MATLAB Programming Contest Blog

April 12th, 2006

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 | 8 Comments »

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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-)

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

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