Blackbox: Contest Evolution

Contents

Beam Use

The fifth entry to take the lead, Nick Howe's Decimator2, returned the exact answer for every problem. So well before we came out of Darkness, the challenge was to reduce the beam use.

Let's take a look at the beam use for all the leaders. In the following graph, the sample entry is the left column and the winning entry is the right column. Each puzzle is a row, and they are sorted by difficulty (as measured by the total number of guesses used by all the leaders on that puzzle).

Notice where the beam count suddenly drops to zero, i.e. the row turns white. This is when a contestant hard-coded an the answer to one of the puzzles in the submission by using information extracted from the actual test suite. By the end of the contest, there were seven puzzles that used zero beams yet returned the correct answer. This technique created a lot of controversy and good discussion in the newsgroup about the nature of the contest.

Activity of the winners

Looking at the activity of the contest winners shows their different participation styles. Each winner is listed in order and a red line marks the deadline for the phase he won.

Conclusion

Thanks for participating, whether by entering the contest many times, once, or merely checking out the site every now and again.

Be sure to sign up on our notify list so you'll be ready to play the next contest: Send an e-mail to lists@mathworks.com with "subscribe contest-announce" in the body.

Colophon

This contest analysis was calculated and published entirely from MATLAB. We used the Database Toolbox to pull the information directly from the contest database. This HTML document was automatically generated from a MATLAB script using "Publish to HTML", a feature introduced in R14.

Published with MATLAB® 7.4