MATLAB Programming Contest Blog

November 9th, 2007

Sergey Yurgenson’s entry was the best one submitted before 5PM, making him our Early Bird winner. He took two of the prizes last contest, and you can read his commentary in the Hall of Fame.

We’re moving our traditional Leap contest to Saturday. The goal of this challenge is to submit the entry that makes the biggest single improvement in score. This challenge starts at midnight and runs for 24 hours. We’ll keep track of the results in our statistics.

18:31 UTC | Posted in Gene Splicing | Permalink |

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2 Responses to “Sergey Yurgenson is Our Early Bird Winner, Saturday Leap Announced”

1. Alan Chalker replied on November 10th, 2007 at 01:00 UTC :
   

   Here is my traditional analysis of the scoring formula. I noticed the the rules for this contest don’t explicitly spell out the scoring formula as in past contests, however I’ve determined it’s exactly the same is for the Peg Solitaire contest, which is:

   score = k1*result + k2*e(k3*runtime) + k4*max(complexity-10,0)

   Where:

   k1 = 0.1
   k2 = 2
   k3 = 0.05
   k4 = 1

   The current leading entry has a time of 91s, result of 59747, and cyc of 24. Here’s a breakdown of the current tradoffs:

   -cyc and score are a 1:1 ratio (i.e. each point shaved off cyc is a point shaved off the score)

   -time and score are a 0.1:0.95 ratio
   -result and score are a 1:0.1 ratio

   We are a little past the ‘knee’ of the time exponential curve, which is rather flat until about ~80s). Therefore more is to be gained right now by shaving off time than anything else. Hope this helps everyone!

2. Alan Chalker replied on November 10th, 2007 at 13:40 UTC :
   

   As I’ve done in the past, I’ve also now submitted a heavily commented version of the Friday night leading code to help casual players better understand how the algorithms work. It’s titled “Read Me 1st” and is submission # 43338
   http://www.mathworks.com/contest/splicing.cgi/view_submission.html?id=43338

   Other obligations are preventing me from commenting it quite to the extent I’ve done in the past, but I think this should still be quite helpful. If you make changes, please don’t remove the comments. Let’s keep this contest ‘in the daylight’ as much as possible instead of obscufating everything.

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

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