Cody has recently reached several significant milestones. I’d like to take a moment to recognize these milestones and also offer a challenge.

First let’s acknowledge two people: the winner of the 5,000th Solver badge, and the author of 1,000th problem.

Badges in Cody are the Olympic medals of MATLAB achievement. Well, maybe not that grand, but as players contribute to Cody, badges and points are earned in recognition of various accomplishments. A Cody player’s reputation increases with each badge. David (that’s the only name he’s made public) is the 5000th person to solve a problem on Cody. This achievement also makes him the 5000th person to earn the Solver Badge. David solved Problem 1. Times 2 – START HERE, which is the first problem we recommend to all new Cody Players.

There are currently more than 1100 problems on Cody. Who created the 1000th? Counting problems is a little tricky, because some have been deleted along the way. You might think the problem with ID=1000 (Richard Zapor’s Zernike Coefficients) would be the right choice. But that was actually only the 698th problem in order of creation. The prize for Number One Thousand goes to Claudio Gelmi for his problem Number of lattice points within a circle.

Cody is a game, and like most games, there is a score. The scores change all the time, but let’s recognize the amazing achievements of our current top three. We can call these our current virtual Gold, Silver, and Bronze medal winners. But watch closely… in another two days the top three might shift around again. Alfonso is charging hard!

Finally, here’s the challenge. The next big milestone we want to recognize is the 200th person to receive the Creator Badge. Just as a store might honor its one millionth customer, MathWorks will honor the 200th player to receive the Creator Badge by giving out a small prize. What will the prize be? How small will it be? Maybe it will be a t-shirt, maybe a water bottle, or maybe even a small electric car*. I will have to check to see what is in the MathWorks prize vault.

*Editor’s Note: Prize will not be a car

The three virtual medal winners (Richard Zapor, @bmtran, and Alfonso Nieto-Castanon) as well as David and Claudio will be sent a MathWorks prize as a thank-you for their participation on Cody.

As I mentioned I will also be sending a prize to the 200th community member to receive their Creator Badge. If you haven’t tried Cody yet, now is the time. The next prize may be yours!