MATLAB Programming Contest Blog

May 9th, 2007

Welcome back everybody! We’re happy to announce that the next MATLAB Programming Contest starts today. The format will be very similar to past contests, but we’re making a couple small changes to the rules.

The contest will start at noon on May 9th and end at noon on May 16th (all times Eastern Daylight, GMT -4:00). In the past, the contest launched at 9AM and closed at 5PM. Launching and finishing the contest in the middle of the day makes it easier for us to contact our support staff when there are problems.

Entries that compromise the contest machinery are no longer allowed. We’ve all learned some interesting MATLAB tricks in the past by contestants figuring out how to pass information from one entry to the next, or finding clever ways to execute disallowed functions, but it’s too hard for the few of us running the contest to keep ahead of the group intelligence. Until we can find a more secure system, we’re running up the white flag. In short, no Welching, please.

Extracting specific test points, either the problems or their solutions, from the test suite by manipulating the score, runtime, or error conditions is also forbidden. In the small scale, this has been an element of many past contests, but in the Blockbuster Contest, Alan Chalker turned this into a science. Tuning the entry to the contest test suite via tweak bombing or other techniques is still allowed, but we ask that you not overwhelm the queue.

We hope these small changes will make the contest more fun for everyone. Please leave us a comment with your feedback, especially if we can clarify the new rules.

It’s another three hours until we post the challenge and officially begin the next contest. Here’s a teaser: peg solitaire. See you in the queue!

By Matthew Simoneau

08:58 UTC | Posted in Peg Solitaire | Permalink | 2 Comments »

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2 Responses to “The Spring 2007 MATLAB Contest Starts Today”

1. Nick Howe replied on May 15th, 2007 at 09:53 UTC :
   

   As far as I am concerned this goes without saying, but you might also want to explicitly prohibit extraction of *answers* to the test suite puzzles. (In Blackbox, the puzzle and answer were the same. But in the Peg contest, one could compute an optimum set of moves and try to pass those back for future use, while claiming innocence to the charge of extracting the *puzzles*. It still amounts to cheating in my mind, but a literalist might claim a difference. :-)

2. Matthew replied on May 15th, 2007 at 16:18 UTC :
   

   Thanks, Nick. I added this to the wording.

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

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