MATLAB Programming Contest Blog

November 10th, 2010

The Fall 2010 MATLAB Programming Contest is Sailing Home and we are officially underway!

See Ned’s contest rules to find out how to play.

If you are a veteran of our contests, you will probably jump right to the rules. If this is your first contest, you might want to read the Contest FAQ or About the contest.  To be truly inspired, take a look at our Hall of Fame to read about the winners of past contests.

Post any questions or comments you may have to the Newsgroup thread.

See you online!

Helen

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.

17:06 UTC | Posted in Sailing Home | Permalink | 1 Comment »

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One Response to “The Sailing Home Contest Begins!”

1. Alan Chalker replied on November 11th, 2010 at 17:06 UTC :
   

   FYI, in case everyone didn’t notice it, there is a significant change to the rules:

   “To keep the queue moving smoothly, you are limited to submitting no more than five files every 15 minutes, for an average of three minutes per file. If we find you are creating multiple accounts in order to get around this limitation, we may disqualify all your entries”

   Of course I’m a little bummed about this, but oh well. Is there anyway to have this restriction be ‘reset’ if the queue is completely empty? Of course I understand the logic behind it, but for those of use who tweak a lot during ‘off hours’ when nobody else is doing anything, it unnecessarily restricts things.

   For example, if the average code run time is ~60 seconds (which is typical of past contests), and nobody else is submitting codes to the queue, I could submit 5 entries in a row at say 2:00AM, have them finish running at 2:05AM, and then have to wait another 10 mins to submit anything while the queue is completely empty and nothing is happening.

   By resetting everyone’s restrictions at that 2:05 mark (with the queue empty), I can then submit another 5 entries (making good use of the contest machinery), and anybody else who happened to come along and submit an entry would only have to wait 5 minutes for it to run (or a max of 15 mins if my entries all timed out)

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

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