MATLAB Programming Contest Blog

December 6th, 2006

Congratulations to our new contest winner, Alan Chalker, who won with the ultimate ultimate of his “The End” series, End of it all. Alan walked away with the Tuesday Leap prize, and still had enough secrets in his back pocket to take the top slot. Alan wins (another) piece of real estate in our Contest Hall of Fame, assorted MATLAB goodies, and a laser pointer in honor of the careful solving (and probing) he did on his way to first place.

This is the fastest we’ve ever seen the queue empty out at the end of the contest… we’re glad to be able to announce the winner before leaving work for the day. Thanks again to everyone who participated. Look for the generality prize in a few days, and be sure and tell us what you like and don’t like about the contest, either in comments here or in the newsgroup. If you can give us specific suggestions about what would make the contest more fun, we might well implement your idea some day. We don’t have the resources to do it all quickly, but we are listening and taking notes!

18:31 UTC | Posted in Blackbox | 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.

3 Responses to “And the winner is…”

1. Daniel Nordlund replied on December 7th, 2006 at 10:40 UTC :
   

   I think it would be more rewarding with a contest that focuses on Matlab and it’s language rather than probing and constant tweaking. During this contest I found that the most interesting part was the cheating entries. For example, that way I learned how powerful dynamic regexps are. I did not learn anything from looking at the winning entry.

   Like someone wrote in the newsgroup, another round of Matlab Golf would be great! It’s a lot of fun and you learn plenty about the Matlab language, syntax and functions you perhaps didn’t know about such as TRACE and KRON.

   Another idea, perhaps even more useful, would be a series of pure optimization challenges. It could be similar to the golf contest only the point would be to write the fastest code that produces the correct solution - e.g. finds the longest palindrom in a string or “the heaviest box” of a matrix. Just use a similar but slightly different data set for the final evaluation of entries to make sure people can’t probe and then use lookup tables.

2. Niilo Sirola replied on December 7th, 2006 at 14:39 UTC :
   

   Wasn’t able to contribute much this time around, but the problem sure was interesting, as was the “creative cheating” discussions in the newsgroup.

   I’m still looking forward to see some future challenges in continuous variables rather than discrete. This would bring lots of new things to be tweaked like discretization and maybe finally favor Matlab BLAS routines over spaghetti code. Also, continuous test cases would have more “information content” making probing more difficult

3. Rajiv Narayan replied on December 8th, 2006 at 19:57 UTC :
   

   I’ve really enjoyed participating in these contests, and though my entries rarely figure at the top, I have found writing them to be addictive, and a fun learning experience. One of the aspects that interests me is to examine different algorithmic approaches to a problem. I think it would be useful to be able to cluster or group submissions by using a source code similarity measure. I like the idea of a generality prize, and would also like to suggest a prize for the most readable/commented entry, in order to encourage clarity rather than obfuscation. Looking forward to the next puzzle!

Leave a Reply

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

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