I want to acknowledge a superhuman feat of skill, dedication, and generosity. Walter Roberson has surpassed 50,000 reputation points on MATLAB Answers. That equates to almost 28,000 answers across five years. Without asking for anything in return, Walter is providing a priceless service to MATLAB users around the world. For this, we want to thank him.

Let’s Run Some Numbers

This is MATLAB after all. Let’s do a little analysis. First let’s get the numbers.

rep = getAnswersTop50;

The variable rep contains the scores of the top 50 people on Answers. As expected, Walter is right at the top.

rep

rep = 

       50593
       34958
       17152
       15769
       14050
        8767
        8400
        7723
        7224
        6088

Walter and Everybody Else

This makes it clear that Walter sits atop a mighty throne.

barh(rep(1:10))
set(gca,'YDir','reverse')
grid
xtl = string(0:10000:60000);
set(gca,'XTickLabels',xtl)
ylim([0 11])
set(gca,'YTick',1:10)
ytl = string(1:10);
ytl(1) = string('Walter');
set(gca,'YTickLabel',ytl)
title('Walter and Everybody Else')
xlabel('Reputation')
ylabel('Rank')

To give a little perspective to his enormously large reputation, consider that you need 3000 to be invested with all the powers of a community editor. Three thousand is a lot of points. To date, only 25 people have managed it.

The red line shows 3000. Walter passed that mark long long ago.

line(3000*[1 1],ylim,'Color','red','LineStyle','-','LineWidth',2)

Here the top 50 are shown as a regular plot. You can see there’s a pretty rapid drop-off from the Olympian heights of the top 5.

plot(rep,'.','MarkerSize',15)
grid
ytl = string(0:10000:60000);
set(gca,'YTickLabels',ytl)
title('Reputations of the Top 50 Contributors in Answers')
xlabel('Contributor Rank')
ylabel('Reputation')

Let’s consider ALL the leaders from positions 26 through 50. Highlight them as shown below.

patch([25 50 50 25],[0 0 1e04 1e04],[0.9 0 0],'FaceAlpha',0.2,'EdgeColor','none')

So Walter, by himself, has more than the total of the top contributors 26 through 50. Shown in red is a cumulative sum of ranked positions 26 through 50.

hold on
stairs(26:50,cumsum(rep(26:50)),'r')
line(26:50,cumsum(rep(26:50)),'LineStyle','none','Color','red','Marker','.','MarkerSize',18)
grid on
line(xlim,rep(1)*[1 1],'LineStyle','-','LineWidth',1)
hold off

Point Production Rate

How long has it taken Walter to amass this total? We’ll pick the middle of January, 2011 as the nominal start date for MATLAB Answers.

t = date - datetime('15-Jan-2011');
hours(t)

ans = 50712

Around 50,000 hours! Interesting coincidence. So…

fprintf('Averaged across five and a half years, Walter is earning %4.3f points/hour!\n',rep(1)/hours(t))

Averaged across five and a half years, Walter is earning 0.998 points/hour!

That’s one point every hour since the bell rang on opening day. Call him “Mr. PPH” (Point Per Hour). You try keeping that rate up all day every day for nearly six years.

Thanks Walter!