MATLAB Programming Contest Blog

April 28th, 2010

Alan Chalker asked in a Newsreader post if I could overview some of the new features of the new contest site. Ned and I reviewed the requests in UserVoice from last season.  Ned is going to go and update the specific requests in that listing, but I thought I’d share some of my favorite features.

• Require login. This has been a standing request for many years.  Doing this allows us to have user profiles that you can click through. Having known users names also helps us get more meaningful reports since we know the data for each user is being aggregated.
• Max 10 submits per player in 10 minutes: This is another request from the community do minimize the queue flooding especially towards the end of the contest. If anyone updates their queue flooding scripts for the new contest, after each 10 files, you will get an error message.
• Show  pass/fail code during darkness. As Alan noted in an early email, this is now enabled. The original request described the issue that it helps players see what entries have failed and why.
• Standardize the UI. By displaying data in standard MATLAB Central page/table layout,  users can see more data on a single page. For instance, on the Submission Page you can now view all submissions, the queue and also scored submissions. On the Player Page, you can sort by either the player name or by the number of submissions per player.
• Comments. You can make comments on other players submissions. You can review the comments on the Comments page.

A great deal of effort was made to pull over features that you used to use in the old system.  Things like diff and clone exist and are very easy to use. There have been a great deal of changes that you don’t really see. Things like making the system more scalable to support our large contest following and, my favorite, making contests easier to start-up and run!

So that’s my list of favorite things. What’s your favorite feature new or old? What features are still on  your wishlist?

By Helen Chen

Helen is part of the MATLAB Central team. She spends her days hanging out with really cool folks online at MATLAB Central and at MathWorks HQ in Natick.

22:17 UTC | Posted in Sensor | Permalink | 9 Comments »

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9 Responses to “New Contest Website Features”

1. Alan Chalker replied on April 29th, 2010 at 03:34 UTC :
   

   Overall this is a great improvement. One minor thing I don’t like is how the blog posting seems to be buried deeper under more links. It’d be nice if this showed up on the main page like it used to.

2. Alan Chalker replied on April 29th, 2010 at 03:39 UTC :
   

   So I figure I might as well ask this now instead of later: With the new login requirements and submission limits, are you explicitly establishing a rule that a given player is only allowed to use 1 login id?

3. Alan Chalker replied on April 29th, 2010 at 12:05 UTC :
   

   Another interesting new feature I just noticed is that we don’t have to have unique titles for our submissions anymore. That’s the reason a lot of the titles have numbers and letters appended to them, which is going to be a hard habit to break;)

4. Helen Chen replied on April 29th, 2010 at 13:14 UTC :
   

   Thanks for the feedback Alan. :-)

   The blogs do seem harder to find. We’ll take a look at that for the next release.

   On the “1 user = 1 login id”, this is tied to your MathWorks.com login. So one login = 1 contest user.

   On unique titles, yes, we no longer require you to have unique titles. If it helps your process to have your own serialization strategy, you can certainly continue to do so.

5. Seth Popinchalk replied on April 29th, 2010 at 15:31 UTC :
   

   @Alan Chalker – Thanks for the feedback on the site… the contest blog posts are still front and center on the contest page, and the blog is linked on the left side bar on each contest page. I did notice that it links to the archive, and maybe we can improve that.

   Regarding the login requirements, there is no rule that a given player use only one login ID, but if we start giving awards for most prolific, or greatest improved, multiple IDs would hurt your chances. It might be interesting if your own submissions were competing for the top spot.

   Also, thanks for noticing that the titles don’t have to be unique. We have already seen some pretty interesting titles. My favorites is 11iIiiIlllliIlllill1i.

6. Alan Chalker replied on April 29th, 2010 at 16:20 UTC :
   

   Another thing I just noticed is that the entry submission time appears to be shown in GMT, not Eastern. That might cause some confusion later in the contest…..

7. Alan Chalker replied on April 29th, 2010 at 16:33 UTC :
   

   Sorry for spamming the comments here… another question though.

   The ‘Search Submissions’ function seems to be acting a little weird. Is it searching just the titles? Or also the contents of the code? Or something else. I try searching for my name and nothing comes up. However if you search for something like Aest a lot of things come up, making me think it’s looking at the code. This is a small gap in the darkness wall if so, since by searching for various function names you can get an general idea of what other people are putting in their code.

   PS: I really like the way you can adjust the entry listing tables to sort by various columns!

8. Helen Chen replied on April 29th, 2010 at 18:54 UTC :
   

   Alan –

   The search is intended to be a search through code. If you are searching for your name, try the Players link on the side. You can also click on your name and go to your profile page to get to the list of your posts.

   On the time question, everything on MATLAB Central is UTC. We made that decision intentionally because our community comes from all over the globe. Ned used UTC in his post. I’ll try to be better about doing that when I’m updating.

   BTW, we like discussion and feedback – that’s not spam for us. :-)

9. Helen Chen replied on April 30th, 2010 at 14:14 UTC :
   

   @Alan – We’ve changed how we link to the blog.

   Helen

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