MATLAB Programming Contest Blog

April 11th, 2012

Sergey’s Cats are Best of Show

You can learn a lot from the names of contest entries. Nuwan Ganganath had a series of submissions reporting the news from Indonesia and Sri Lanka about the recent earthquake. I might have learned more from Nuwan except I don’t speak Sinhala. Vitor has been giving us lessons in Portuguese throughout the week (melhor = better, mais = more, ….), and Yi Cao was kind enough to include a translation in his title: 金钥匙 golden key. Our friend Gwendolyn Fischer lifted a page from Magnus S, launching a series of entries which describes someone’s (her?) activities and predilections.

But ahead of them all, there with his cats, serene and all-seeing, sits Sergey Y. When all the cards come out on the table, that’s when we see who was holding and who was bluffing. Everybody has the same plan: add one last trick to the code. Something that no one else has seen. But it’s easier said than done. And it must be said: Sergey was not bluffing. His cats bring home the goods. His penultimate leader CatsAreComing gave a 0.12% improvement, huge at this stage of the match. The icing on the cake was his winner, CatsAreComing?

Sergey, our congratulations to you! You’ve won many (many) prizes from us, but never the big trophy. Now it’s yours, and well earned. Will you please send us a picture of your cats and tell us their names?