Been there done that

Depicting the progression of code originality.

Description

It seemed to me from past contests that most novel code development occurred during the darkness and twilight phases of the contest. During daylight relatively few strategies were explored and then tweaked to death. I wondered to what extent having code in the open influenced others and how much novel code arose during daylight. I thought it might be interesting to try and visualize these trends.

This entry takes a similar approach to quantifying originality of the code as the Creativity entry by Rafal Kasztelanic. However instead of trying to identifying the most original authors the aim here is to depict the temporal progression of code originality.

PS: While the current contest is interesting in its own right and poses several interesting challenges, I cant say it is as much fun as its has been in the past. It certainly smells more like work than a game! Having said that, I think it has grown on me enough for me to venture an entry.

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.3 (R2006b)

[us]

no comprehensible H1 line, no help section, no example(s), loads a file, which the typical ML user does not have and, therefore, causes an error right away...
us

[Doug Hull]

To answer the question of using data not normally on the MATLAB path, I offer the following modification.
 
if ~exist('contest_data.mat','file')
    warning ('This was an entry to the MATLAB programming contest (http://www.mathworks.com/contest/datavis/home.html). Please load the contest data and unzip it to place contest_data.mat on your MATLAB path.')
    web('http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/23509?controller=file_infos&download=true')
end