MATLAB Programming Contest Blog

April 1st, 2009

The Spring 2009 MATLAB Programming Contest is under way.

As we said, this contest is structured very differently from our usual contests. The complete rules are available here, but in a nutshell, this is an open-ended contest where you are the judge. We want you to look at one very interesting data set and see what kind of insights you can mine from it. The data set in question is one of the most interesting that I know of: the data from one of our previous contests, the Peg Solitaire contest that we ran in May of 2007. I’ve been looking at data from this and other contests for years now, and I’m constantly finding new stories buried in the data. And since many of you actually participated in that contest, you’ll be particularly well positioned to find the good stories hiding in there.

As a side note, you will see a few MathWorkers like me contributing entries during this contest, but we’re not allowed to win any prizes.

16:42 UTC | Posted in Data Visualization | Permalink |

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5 Responses to “We’re under way!”

1. Eric replied on April 1st, 2009 at 17:53 UTC :
   

   What’s going to happen on the main File Exchange page, where every tag is listed individually in the ‘tags’ column, when a file gets hundreds/thousands of vote tags during the contest?

   In each files’ page, the repeated tags are listed as vis2009(N). Perhaps this change needs to be made to the File Exchange page before things get out of hand? It would also make it easier to see how many votes a given submission has when browsing or searching by tag.

2. Jos replied on April 2nd, 2009 at 13:33 UTC :
   

   Although I agree it’s better than Marco’s usage of matlab, this contest is going to pollute the whole File Exchange! And it almost looks like this is intended policy by TMW …

3. Ken Eaton replied on April 3rd, 2009 at 19:46 UTC :
   

   I took a look at the contest data supplied, and noticed that there are no darkness submissions in there (although there is a “darkness” field for the submission data). Is this correct?

4. Ned replied on April 3rd, 2009 at 20:20 UTC :
   

   You are correct. That’s a mistake. The “darkness” field should be 1 up through d(373) and 0 thereafter. I’ll re-upload the data, but here is some code that will fix your data.

   for i = 1:length(d)
       if i < = 373
           d(i).darkness = 1;
           d(i).twilight = 0;
           d(i).daylight = 0;
       elseif i <= 980
           d(i).darkness = 0;
           d(i).twilight = 1;
           d(i).daylight = 0;
       else
           d(i).darkness = 0;
           d(i).twilight = 0;
           d(i).daylight = 1;
       end
   end
   

5. Matthew replied on April 6th, 2009 at 17:34 UTC :
   

   Eric, good point about redundant tags. We’ve implemented a change for this which will go out in the next release of the File Exchange application.

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

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