MATLAB Programming Contest Blog

November 15th, 2010

Limbo! The 100 Node Challenge

The surprises keep on coming. I was impressed with the improvements made through Sunday, particularly noting Sergey’s big improvement with StarCat1. As I said, it’s hard to make big gains by the time Sunday rolls around, and Sergey showed us a 3.71% improvement. So I was shocked to see Peter van der Walle take the lead this morning with an incredible 4.42% improvement on his nickelfelpeter. Not only that, the size of the code started to nosedive at that point, leading us to some fierce, lean code.

We often do a 1000 node challenge right about now in the contest, but since the leading entries are already at about 1000, we really wanted to set the limbo bar low. The new challenge is to see what you can do when you’re limited to only 100 nodes. Yes, that’s a tiny number, but necessity is the mother of invention. Whoever can achieve the best score by midnight on Tuesday, UTC (7 PM in the eastern US) will win the 100 Node Challenge. The top of the Statistics page has a section dedicated to showing who’s in the lead while satisfying the required 100 node limitation.

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By Ned Gulley

Ned is part of the MATLAB Central team.

23:38 UTC | Posted in Sailing Home | Permalink | 3 Comments »

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3 Responses to “Limbo! The 100 Node Challenge”

  1. the cyclist replied on November 16th, 2010 at 00:56 UTC :

    Will you be displaying the number of nodes in each entry, as an aid to the 100 Node Challenge?

  2. Alan Chalker replied on November 16th, 2010 at 04:00 UTC :

    A clarification please: is it < 100 nodes or <= 100 nodes?

  3. Ned replied on November 16th, 2010 at 18:44 UTC :

    The “length” numbers are now appearing on the statistics page, and the rule is < = 100 nodes.

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