Trucking Contest Winners

I've watched all the previous contests, but this was the first time I had enough time to participate. I didn't aim for the win; I just wanted to have some fun and try to get my signature to the top of the list at least a couple of times. I was sure that one of the contest veterans would have some special trick saved for the end, and I was very surprised that I won.

The contest closed at midnight my time, and I had planned on going to bed early. I was shutting down my computer when I decided to try once more. I submitted the "Add more freight" entry, watched The Sketch Show, and after returning was surprised to note that it worked, and no one else had thought of it. Since I had named the submission clearly and commented the change, I thought it would be obvious to everyone that adding gas and other tricks would help. Therefore, I was in hurry just to submit before anyone else, so that I would get my signature to the first place at least for a few minutes. :-) "More tricks" was submitted almost 20 minutes before the contest closed and there were at least five derivatives of it, so after the contest closed I was quite sure that someone would top my result. I went to bed before the queue had been processed.

Less than 5% of my code was in the winning entry. However, it took me a couple of hours a day to follow the contest and identify the changes that made significant progress. Better commenting would make it easier.

I would like to thank the MathWorks Contest Team for organizing the event and all the participants for making the contest a chaotic, addictive, and fun event.

--Aki Vehtari

Paulo was the Grand Prize winner from the recent MATLAB Protein Contest. This is also the third contest where Paulo has won a prize! To find out more about Paulo, see the winners page from the Molecule Contest. Paulo lives in Maryland and uses MATLAB at work to design and test DSP algorithms.

Also, be sure to check out the picture of Paulo and his two daughters, all sporting the latest in MATLAB fashion! Click on the image to enlarge.

Here Paulo takes the time to tell us about his winning strategy and why the Rand function should continue to be allowed in the contest:

A Winning Strategy

I won the Early Bird Prize by adding randomness to the leading algorithm of the time. The original algorithm chose the next location to go by passing all possible locations through a metric and then choosing the one with the highest score. The problem with this is that it might be getting stuck in a local maximum. I therefore modified the leading entry to choose randomly, with equal probability, between the two best locations if they have a similar score. This worked really well as the score improved by 6 points.

Now, as the one that introduced the surprisingly criticized Rand function, I feel that I have to come to the defense of it. It has been suggested to block the Rand function because “the contest is about developing an algorithm, not about gambling”. This would really hamper the contest, as it would disallow the realm of randomized algorithms, which as the name states are really algorithms. A great example of randomized algorithms can be found in the CD Packing Contest. Imagine what that contest would be without Rand. I suggest we keep Rand and let the evolution of the contest dictate its fate.

A Failed Strategy

After winning the Early Bird prize, the contest progressed such that the entries grew to be huge monsters. With the limited time I could spend in the contest, I was left behind very quickly. The night before the last day I tried to analyze the current leader, but there was no way I could make a significant improvement in the hour I set aside for the contest. I didn’t understand the code well enough to tweak it, so I decided that my only chance to win was to take a small portion of the program, improve it, and add it to the winning entry.

I had a hunch that the function "diesel2" could use some improvement so I dissected it and enhanced it. I tested by pasting it to other entries and found that it would improve their score by up to 5 points. I thought I had found the perfect strategy. I then waited until the next day and a few minutes before the deadline, I sent three entries. Two of them modified the current winners at the time and improved both the CPU time and raw score of those entries. I then picked a single entry from the queue to append the new diesel2 function and luckily, for me it was "More tricks", the final winner. However, Aki’s entry was so good that my entry, TurboD2, only improved the raw score by .229 while being slower by half a second.

Congratulations to Aki and the whole MathWorks team!

-- Paulo Uribe

Named in honor of our European contestants, the Midnight Madness prize goes to Christian Ylämäki of Sweden. Christian will receive a MATLAB coffee mug and a bag of Peet's Coffee. Christian is a final-year Electrical Engineering Masters student at Karlstad University in Sweden. His course emphasizes automatic control and digital signal processing using MATLAB.

Christian first came across MATLAB in a math course in his freshman year. He now finds it to be a superior tool for numerous engineering tasks. Besides MATLAB Contests, Christian's other interests include golf, chess, and Go. Christian also enjoys listening to music and hanging out with friends. Here's Christian's contest story: