MATLAB Programming Contest Blog

Nick Howe Wins the Early Bird Special

Matthew — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 03:01:03 +0000

Nick Howe is back! He’s taken (ordered?) the Early Bird Special by submitting the best entry before the 8PM deadline, our first mid-contest award in Daylight.

Our next prize is the Saturday Leap, awarded to the contestant who makes the biggest single improvement to the score between midnight and midnight Eastern Time. You can track the leaps via the statistics.

By the way, we’ve created an event for the MATLAB Contest on Facebook. If you’re participating in the contest, or even just watching, you’re welcome to RSVP for the event or just “like it“.

Your Contest Feedback

Matthew — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:10:44 +0000

At the risk of over-taxing our ancient database, we’ve enabled live updating of the “Queue and Top 20” pages. Hopefully this will reduce confusion about missing entries and improve the interactivity of the contest.

The contest runs on a set of old Perl (frontend) and MATLAB (backend) code, most of which is about 10 years old now. Fortunately, this spring we’re planning to rewrite the contest to use the same modern web architecture that runs the rest of MATLAB Central. This is an opportunity to make some significant improvements, or at least create a better platform for doing so in the future.

We have our own wishlist, sculpted by all the feedback we’ve received over the years, but we’d like to try an experiment. We’ve set up a forum to collect your feedback about the MATLAB Contest on UserVoice. We encourage you to login and contribute a new idea, or just vote up the ones you like. Obviously, we won’t be able to act on all the feedback we receive, but your input will help us prioritize.

Early Bird Special

Matthew — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:18:30 +0000

We’re now in Daylight and everyone’s code in visible. To get things rolling, we’ll award an Early Bird Special to the best-scoring entry submitted before 8PM Eastern. Good luck!

Small Rule Tweak: Limit to Vector Length

Matthew — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:16:58 +0000

To keep entries which return really long colors vector from slowing down the queue, we’ve capped the length of each at numel(board). Anything longer than that will be ignored. We’ve updated the rules and the submission to reflect this. This updated submission will score your entries faster, thanks to an optimization from David Hruska.

Oliver Woodford wins Twilight

Matthew — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:34:25 +0000

Oliver Woodford is the winner of the Twilight phase of the contest and a new inductee into the Hall of Fame. The next five finishers are Per Rutquist, Nick Howe, Greg S, Survion, and Nieto-Castanon. It’s great to see some new faces joining our old friends. You can see the complete rankings for the first two phases of the contest in the statistics.

Keeping track of the contest with Twitter

Ned — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:51:29 +0000

The contest queue page is currently operating on a 20 minute refresh rate. We’re working on speeding that up, but you can use Twitter to get up-to-the-minute news on how the contest is going. We’ve created two Twitter accounts.

ContestLeaders is updated every time the lead changes hands. You’ll want to use it so you know the exact instant your code gets into first place (or gets knocked out of first place).
ContestStatus is more of a data firehose. It updates every minute as long as there are jobs in the queue. You’ll want to look at this if you’re concerned about whether or not the queue is healthy.

For your viewing convenience, I’ve created a Twitter list that merges these two feeds into one place here: Contest Feeds.

Nick Howe Wins Darkness

Matthew — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:07:49 +0000

Nick Howe submitted the best entry in the Darkness phase of the contest. A contest veteran, you can read about his previous contest experiences in the Hall of Fame. He’s followed in the rankings by Greg S, Per Rutquist, Anders, Survion, and WillDampier.

Color Bridge Contest is now under way

Helen — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:37:05 +0000

This Fall’s contest is based on the game Flood-it.

As usual, we are starting out in Darkness moving into Twilight, then Daylight. The contest will run until next Wednesday, November 11, 2009, high noon (Boston time). Links to get started:

The rules are especially important to read if you are new to to contest.
Start playing by downloading the zip on File Exchange
If you have questions or comments, you can post to the newsgroup thread

Enjoy!

Helen and the MATLAB Central Contest Team

2009 Fall Contest: November 4 - 11

Helen — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:01:53 +0000

Psst, have you heard?

The next MATLAB contest will be held November 4th through 11th. By popular demand, we’re returning to the traditional contest format. We think that the new game will be fun for everyone, so make sure you note the date in your calendar.

See you there!

Helen and the MATLAB Central Contest Team

Data visualization contest winner

hull — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 17:24:57 +0000

The voting period for the data visualization contest has ended. We are happy to award the top prize to C Jethro Lam for his entry: Finding the similar entries: a Quantitative approach based on CPU Runtime Behavior.

Congratulation on the winning entry and welcome to the Hall of Fame! Thank you to those that voted for the winner, especially when you had your own entries in the contest!

Voting Period Continues

Matthew — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:08:50 +0000

The deadline has passed for new submissions, but voting continues until Friday at Noon EDT. Browse the list of entries and vote for your favorites by tagging them “vis2009″. Look for the “Published M Files” on the submission’s page to view the entry without having to download the ZIP file.

Rafal Kasztelanic is our Early Bird Winner

Matthew — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 16:21:41 +0000

By popular vote, Rafal Kasztelanic’s submission, MATLAB Contest - creativity is the winner of our Early Bird award. His visualizations show the authors who contributed the most original lines of code to the contest. We welcome Rafal Kasztelanic, a new contributor to the File Exchange and a new inductee to the contest Hall of Fame. Pulling an equal number of votes, but submitted a couple hours later, is nathan’s meet the family, which tracks evolution and parentage using both code analysis and explicitly credit. Both of these entries remain in the running for the final prize, so follow them in the Rankings and cast your votes accordingly.

Early-Bird Prize

Matthew — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 19:03:31 +0000

We will award an Early Bird prize for the entry with the most votes on Monday at noon EDT. For this mid-contest prize, there well be no designated voting period, so entries submitted earlier will have the opportunity to attract more votes.

As explained in the rules, you vote for an entry by tagging it “vis2009″. If you change your mind, simply remove your tag. All entries are listed on the Rankings page. Vote for as many entries as you’d like.

How to publish your code

hull — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 19:58:23 +0000

With this contest, one of the skills required to enter is the ability to publish code that was written in cell mode. The seventh video I ever made for my blog was on this subject. Take a look at this blog entry from 2006 to see how to publish your code. Remember to include the HTML directory in the .ZIP file that you submit as your entry into the contest.

http://blogs.mathworks.com/videos/2006/12/05/automatically-generated-reports-from-matlab/

For those of you looking for the exact way to format your code, you can skip ahead to 1:05 into the video.

We’re under way!

Ned — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:42:08 +0000

The Spring 2009 MATLAB Programming Contest is under way.

As we said, this contest is structured very differently from our usual contests. The complete rules are available here, but in a nutshell, this is an open-ended contest where you are the judge. We want you to look at one very interesting data set and see what kind of insights you can mine from it. The data set in question is one of the most interesting that I know of: the data from one of our previous contests, the Peg Solitaire contest that we ran in May of 2007. I’ve been looking at data from this and other contests for years now, and I’m constantly finding new stories buried in the data. And since many of you actually participated in that contest, you’ll be particularly well positioned to find the good stories hiding in there.

As a side note, you will see a few MathWorkers like me contributing entries during this contest, but we’re not allowed to win any prizes.

New contest starts tomorrow

Ned — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 22:42:23 +0000

Tomorrow we will be launching a new contest on data visualization. Its format will be very different from our other contests to date. Look for more information at noon tomorrow (12 PM EDT) when the contest opens.

Army Ants Contest Winners

Matthew — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:43:40 +0000

In case you missed it we posted the Army Ants Contest Winners, along with a background and commentary of each.

Commentary: all King vs. King pairings on actual boards

hull — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:37:15 +0000

Doug has posted his commentary showing all possible pairings of the various Kings of the Hill. See which Kings held up best against all the others.

Fabio C. Wins the Army Ants Contest

Matthew — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:23:16 +0000

The entry processing machine is exhausted. It was a long haul. When the smoke cleared, Fabio C.’s entry was on the top, making him the winner of the Army Ants contest. He joins our other winners, listed in the Statistics, in the MATLAB Contest Hall of Fame.

nathan q and Edin Win Daylight Rounds 3 and 4

Matthew — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 01:14:45 +0000

Congratulations to our two new winners, nathan q and Edin. Unless these are pseudonyms, they are two new inductees into the Hall of Fame.

We’ve applied the patch suggested by Markus Buehren that will stop entries from failing when the King of the Hill errors. We’re in our final round and near the end of the contest. Good luck!

New video commentary posted

hull — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:03:43 +0000

Doug has posted his video commentary showing the first five King Of The Hill entries running on the first three boards. Watch it here.

Markus Wins the Saturday-Sunday Round

Matthew — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 20:23:56 +0000

Markus wins this round, followed by SY, pagangod, David Jones, and Nick Howe.

You can now see the rankings for all previous rounds in the statistics.

David Jones is our Friday-Saturday Winner

Matthew — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 19:48:24 +0000

David Jones is our winner for the Friday-Saturday round and the new King of the Hill. David dominated our last contest, as recorded in the Hall of Fame, and it’s great to see him back. SY, Jan Langer, Alan Chalker, and the cyclist followed him in the rankings, contest heavyweights all.

Contest video commentary: Darkness

hull — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 22:06:13 +0000

Doug has posted his commentary on the first King of the Hill. It is in video form on his regular Video tutorial blog. The first four boards are run and commented on. (Six minutes).

We can’t get the Queue and Top 20 page to refresh. For now, please use this (ugly) page here.
–Matthew

nathan q is the Twilight Winner

Matthew — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 19:42:22 +0000

Congratulations to nathan q for winning the Twilight round. SY, Jan Langer, Abhisek Ukil, and Andreas Bonelli round-out the top five. We’re now in daylight, where everyone can see all the code, including King of the Hill.

We now have our first round in Daylight, ending tomorrow at noon. We’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the timing details, largely based on feedback we’ve been getting in the newsgroup. We’ve decided to do one daylight round as-is. We’ve been experimenting with some alternative timing metrics based on your feedback, but aren’t yet sure what changes to make. This is a new format, so keep telling us how it’s working out for you.