MATLAB Programming Contest Blog

May 1st, 2010

We’re still tuning things with this new interface, but Matt’s got the statistics page fired up. You can now see lots of good data on who’s doing what. Unfortunately, the links to the individual entries don’t work yet (they’re still using the old link structure), but we’ll get that sorted out before long. [UPDATE: the entry links are working properly now]

With the stats page running, we’re in a position to go ahead with the Saturday Leap prize and the always popular Big Sunday Push prize. These prizes are defined as follows: whoever makes the biggest percentage improvement with a single entry on Saturday wins the Leap prize, and whoever makes the biggest percentage improvement aggregated across all their entries on Sunday wins a prize. Since we’ve switched over to universal time (UTC), that means Saturday has already started, so Alex P.’s recent improvements will be grandfathered in.

Good luck!

By Ned Gulley

Ned is part of the MATLAB Central team.

01:58 UTC | Posted in Sensor | Permalink | 3 Comments »

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3 Responses to “Stats are up and running”

1. Alan Chalker replied on May 2nd, 2010 at 15:15 UTC :
   

   I have been able to figure out the scoring formula and am posting it here as I traditionally do. As usual, it’s very similar to the recent contests:

   score = k1*result + k2*e(k3*runtime) + k4*max(complexity-10,0) + k5*nodes

   Where:

   k1 = 0.002
   k2 = 0.01
   k3 = 0.1
   k4 = 1
   k5 = 0.001

   The current leading entry has a time of 77s, result of 14064009, cyc of 23, and nodes of 3537. 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 1:2.2 ratio
   -result and score are a 1:0.002 ratio
   -node and score are a 1:0.001 ratio

   As is common at this point in the contest, Abhisek Ukil’s entries have already settled in just below the ‘knee’ of the time exponential curve, which is rather flat until about ~85s. However, because of results are so high right now and change quite a bit with small tweaks, I think we are going to find more payoff in trying to reduce the results by processing the images for a bit longer, at least until the times get up around the 95s range. Unfortunately that also means that during the various contest end times the queue is going to get very backlogged, since each entry will take several minutes to execute.

2. Alan Chalker replied on May 2nd, 2010 at 15:17 UTC :
   

   One more note to the MATLAB team.. my coefficients and formula model don’t match up perfectly at the very high time entries.. they end up being off by a couple score points. Is this because you are actually doing the score calculation with more sig figs than you are showing stats for each entry?

3. Ned replied on May 3rd, 2010 at 14:54 UTC :
   

   Hi Alan:

   You’re right that you can’t see all the digits that we’re doing the calculations with.

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

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