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Subject: Re: Fall 2008 MATLAB Contest, November 5th-12th
Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2008 19:13:02 +0000 (UTC)
Organization: Ohio Supercomputer Ctr
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Looking at the entries that have run so far, it appears time is going to be a MAJOR problem this time around.  The 'contest' machinery itself appears to take over 70 seconds just to run the default 'simple' job.  This is nearly half of the max allowed time of 180 seconds.  I don't recall ever having a situation like this in the past.  

Because we have no control over the number of time intervals that get run or the number of boards, we'll never be able to get below that 70 second time frame.  In fact, the situation is about to get worse, because once the house solver gets replaced by an user submitted code, it's going to add significantly to that overhead, perhaps as much as doubling it.  

In developing my solver, I noticed that on some of the simple boards I was able to kill all the opposing ants and transfer all the sugar to the base in a very small amount of time (~200 time intervals).  The remaining 800 intervals were just 'wasted time' at that point.  Perhaps a change could be made to the run contest code that stops a board if all the ants are dead and all the sugar is at the base?  Alternatively, maybe our solvers can provide an output that means stop running this board and score it as is?  Either of these solutions would potentially allow us more control over the time it takes to run.