Contest Results

The MATLAB Programming contest is over. Congratulations to our official winner, Taylor Sherman, who had the best score (80.0261) among those who submitted their entries before the official end of the contest at 5:00:00 PM EST. Taylor wins a MATLAB denim shirt and a CD compilation of the greatest disco hits of the 70's.

Thanks to everyone for participating and making the first online MATLAB Programming Contest such a success!

Other Prizes

Taylor Sherman, our winner, credits Scott Radcliffe for many of the major optimizations of the winning entry. For that, Scott wins a MATLAB shirt. Finally, just before the queue closed on Friday, Hakan Erdogan snuck into our queue at 5:01:03 PM EST and achieved the low score of 79.0530. Hakan wins a T-shirt and our appreciation for his great efforts.

Earlier in the week, Doug Pedersen won a MATLAB T-shirt in our early-bird competition for submitting the best entry as of Tuesday evening. Taylor Sherman won a MATLAB mug for the first entry to break below 84 points. Paulo Uribe won a MATLAB mug and a CD of the Bee-Gee's Greatest Hits for his entry which was the first to break the MathWorks, Inc. best score of 81.2857.

Contest Statistics

The score started at 1066.79 on Monday morning, and after the first day it was down to 283.83. By Tuesday it had fallen to 96.40 and as of midnight Thursday, the best score was hovering just above 80. After the queue was finally closed on Friday, the best score stood at 79.0530.

We had over 175 different contributors from 27 different top level Internet domains submitting a total of over 1400 individual entries. The lead entry changed a total of 61 times and was held by 18 different contributors over the course of the contest.

The winning entry included contributions from at least 9 different people, including Taylor Sherman, Scott Radcliffe, Paulo Uribe, Peter Acklam, Roger Stuckey, Holger Bosch, Doug Pedersen, and Yves Piguet.

For a graphical look at how the winning entries evolved, please see our analysis of the Contest Evolution

Test Suite

As many of you pointed out, the scoring of each of the entries was heavily biased by our choice of test suite. This is a problem that is fundamental to this kind of benchmark testing.

Now that the contest is over, we have posted the complete test suite here.

Analysis

We have also compiled detailed analysis of the winning entry of the competition. We point out some of the clever algorithmic tricks used to leap ahead of the competition and offer notes on some of the optimizations that you may be able to apply to your own work.

The Next MATLAB Programming Contest

If you have comments this contest or suggestions for the next MATLAB Programming contest, send them to us at contest@mathworks.com . Thanks again for playing!

Enter the MATLAB Programming Contest

Enter the MATLAB Programming Contest and win a MATLAB denim shirt! Submit your M-code function to the contest and it will be automatically tested, scored, and ranked against other entries. The contest opens on Monday, December 14 and will close on Friday, December 18, 1998, at 5 PM, EST.

The Challenge

You work for a large record company that markets a line of greatest hits compact discs --- "Super funk of the 70s", "Partridge Family Unlimited", "3 Tenors in Antarctica, Again!". For each CD, you have a list of possible songs, their lengths, and the CD's maximum length.

You would like each CD to be as close to full as possible, but you have a large catalog of CD's to fill, in anticipation of an 80's revival. It's okay to leave a bit of empty space on each CD to get the job done quickly. You have decided to use MATLAB to determine the set of songs for each CD.

How to play

For a complete problem statement and examples, see the Contest Rules.
Take a look at the current entries and rankings. Any entry can be viewed, edited, and resubmitted by other contestants. See a loop that can be vectorized? Fix it and submit it again. Look at some entries to get ideas and learn some new MATLAB coding techniques.
Submit your own entry

Deadline

The contest will close on Friday, December 18. The contest will close to new submissions at 5:00 PM EST (22:00 GMT). The winner of the contest overall will be determined after all entries remaining in the queue have been processed.

Prizes

The winner of the MATLAB programming contest will receive a CD of the greatest disco hits of the 70's and a MATLAB denim shirt.

Feedback

Please send any comments or questions to the MATLAB Programming Contest.

Contest Announcement E-mail List

Don't miss hearing about the next MATLAB Contest. Sign up for our MATLAB Contest mailing list. Send an e-mail to lists@mathworks.com with subscribe contest-announce in the body.

Contest List

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