MATLAB Programming Contest Blog

November 6th, 2008

We’re now in Twilight, where you can see everyone’s scores but not their code.

The queue is a bit backed up and will take a while more to clear. When we’ve scored all the entries submitted before the noon deadline, we’ll declare a winner, stop the queue, and make their entry the new King of the Hill. All entries submitted Thursday afternoon and before Daylight begins at noon on Friday will be scored against this new “house” ant.

18:45 UTC | Posted in Army Ants, MATLAB Contest | Permalink |

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2 Responses to “Twilight Begins”

1. Alan Chalker replied on November 6th, 2008 at 15:12 UTC :
   

   Looking at the entries that have run so far, it appears time is going to be a MAJOR problem this time around. The ‘contest’ machinery itself appears to take over 70 seconds just to run the default ’simple’ job. This is nearly half of the max allowed time of 180 seconds. I don’t recall ever having a situation like this in the past.

   Because we have no control over the number of time intervals that get run or the number of boards, we’ll never be able to get below that 70 second time frame. In fact, the situation is about to get worse, because once the house solver gets replaced by an user submitted code, it’s going to add significantly to that overhead, perhaps as much as doubling it.

   In developing my solver, I noticed that on some of the simple boards I was able to kill all the opposing ants and transfer all the sugar to the base in a very small amount of time (~200 time intervals). The remaining 800 intervals were just ‘wasted time’ at that point. Perhaps a change could be made to the run contest code that stops a board if all the ants are dead and all the sugar is at the base? Alternatively, maybe our solvers can provide an output that means stop running this board and score it as is? Either of these solutions would potentially allow us more control over the time it takes to run.

2. Alan Chalker replied on November 6th, 2008 at 17:58 UTC :
   

   Wow.. the contest is off to an ominous start. It’s nearly 5PM eastern and we still have entries from Darkness being processed. By my calculations entries are averaging about 2.5 mins each to run.. There are 25 entries still in the queue that were submitted prior to noon, meaning we won’t be able to truly go into Twilight with a new ‘house solver’ until after 6PM.

   Add to that the additional ~22 entries submitted after noon sitting in the queue, and someone submitting an entry right now won’t be able to see how it reacts to the new house solver until after 7PM tonight (or to put it into perspective, approximately 30% of the time we have for twilight is lost. This makes the iterative and collaborative intent of the contest almost impossible to achieve.

   Are there any intents from the contest team to try to make changes to the rules / execution in order to account for the issues we are seeing?

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