MATLAB Mini Hack voting starts today! Week 1 winners announced.
In just one week, 500+ amazing entries were created. Math rocks and you rock!
Help us show the world the beauty of mathematics by sharing your work with your friends, classmates, or colleagues. You can also help fight the global pandemic by voting. For each vote, MathWorks will donate $1 to Direct Relief. See the Voting FAQs below for details.
MATLAB Mini Hack Winners - Week 1
Let’s start by saying: your awesome work made our judging VERY HARD! We came up with several categories with one winner each. Congratulations to the winners! Each of you won a special edition T-shirt:
- Adam Danz, entry: pale blue dot , category: Astronomy
- taozim, entry: Collatz Feather , category: Print Art
- Jr, entry: Hi :) , category: 3D Art
- Pink_panther, entry: Guarding Ape of the Math Jungle 1 , category: Animals
- Adrien Leygue, entry: random cut in a d-dimensional checkerboard, category: Black & White
- Barath Narayanan, entry: Julia Set Animation , category: Colorful
- Maximilian Schönau, entry: plot Dark Side , category: Illustration
- Sebastian Kraemer, entry: Cherry blossom tree , category:Plants
- Peter Stampfli, entry: broken inversions , category: deepest remix tree (tie)
- sandeep singh chauhan, entry: BLACK ORCHID, category: deepest remix tree (tie)
- KSSV, entry: I LOVE Matlab, category: widest remix tree
Bonus Prize Winners - Week 1
As we announced last week, we are giving additional giveaways to participants of both the Treasure Hunt contest and the MATLAB Mini Hack contest . Congratulations to our 5 winners. Each of you also won a special edition T-shirt
- Jan Orwat
- warnerchang
- Davide OLIVIERI
- Daniel Niblett
- KARUPPASAMYPANDIYAN M
Voting FAQs:
Q1: Who can vote?
Anyone with a MathWorks account can vote.
Q2: How many times can I vote?
There here is no limit to the number of votes you can cast. Vote for as many entries as you like (one vote per entry).
Q3: How do my votes increase MathWorks’ charity donation?
For every vote an entry gets, we will donate $1 to Direct Relief with a maximum amount of $20 donated per entry. MathWorks will donate up to a maximum of $20,000 based on the combined totals raised by task participation in the Treasure Hunt and voting in the MATLAB Mini Hack .
Q4. How do I win?
At the end of the contest, the top 10 participants on the leaderboard will each get an Amazon gift card and the top 3 will earn special badges. The 10 highest voted entries will win 5 customized T-shirts. See the full contest details.
Every week, we will also award surprise prizes for more fun.
Note that MathWorks staff are NOT eligible for prizes.
Q5: How do votes on my entries determine my rank on the leaderboard?
The total number of votes on ALL of your entries determines your rank on the leaderboard.
Q6: Do votes on remixed entries add votes to the original entry?
No. We count only direct votes on an entry.
Q7: Is the code (also) automatically compared to earlier submissions to determine the remix tree?
No. You have to remix an entry.
24 Comments
Time Descending
After there was some movement within the leaderboard, I had hopes to see some more change. If the contest is not evaluated yet, may I suggest the following?
Correlate each all votes of accounts with each all submissions of single users. If near every vote of a user went to only submission of one single other user, remove these votes or at least count such only fractionally; in particular if entries voted for have significantly low view counts. That should turn out interestingly.
I think the total vote count somehow nicely encourages more submissions, but in order to avoid spam, I would suggest to weight votes counts if there are similar contests in the future. Each users highest voted entry gives full points, the next one half of votes, the next a fourth and so on.
I tried out the latter using the board scraper by Adam Danz, which worked out nicely. Unfortunately, though understandably, only the organizers can see who voted for whom. So there is no way to try out the first part.
There are clearly two types of tendency in the vote distribution for each submission:
- Those with lots of votes in most of their submissions and few submissions with few votes (yellow), and
- Those with few votes on many submissions and lots of votes in some of them (green).
This also correlates with the users that show a higher votes/views ratio.
Nice plots, Daniel.
Find the scraper attached to this comment .
Vote counts across submissions from users with organic growth are more likely to be exponential whereas fan-based votes are flatter as you pointed out. Exponential curves make sense to me since not all submissions from a user are typically equally vote-worthy.
Another parameter to look at is the vertical offset of the curves or the y-intercept which indicates the minimum votes across submissions. For example, if the shape is exponential and there is an unusual vertical offset, that could indicate a combination of fan votes and organic growth.
Keep in mind that fan votes aren't against the rules but they do affect the interpretation of vote counts.
Another way to analyze these data is to compare the distribution of vote counts across time. I scraped the data at least a couple of times a day. Here are the vote distributions across roughly 1.5-2 day periods. Curves that increase and stretch rightward are due to an increase in the number of submissions. Curves that increase linearly indicate sweeps of votes that are consistent with new fan votes. Contributors are in order of vote count on the first scrape.
The full dataset containing all 30 scrapes from 12-Oct to 1-Nov (not shown) shows that some contributors had 100+ vote increases in a matter of hours while the majority of other contributors had a somewhat consistent increase in the 10s or less.
The scraper and the analyses are just for fun and to play around with some data. Votes are just another metric and people can decide what weight they put on it.
Hi, How long all our creations will stay online ?
We do not plan on taking them down, however we will turn off voting, remixing, and creating new entries.
It's clear that many participants have put a lot of work and creativity into their Mini Hack submissions and I am enjoying learning from them. Trying to fit an original work into 280 characters is quite the challenge and has taught me a new way to think about code construction, although I wouldn't want to get into the habit of using some of these shortcuts!
As a fellow participant, I encourage current and future participants in the contest not to feel disincentivized or intimidated by vote counts. When browsing the gallery, impressive submissions catch the eye, not vote numbers. People know originality and impressive methodology when they see it. At the end of the day, feel great about what you've produced out of nothing and that reward will get you much further in life than a relative number of votes.
I hope to see more submissions that showcase the imagination and abilities of the Matlab Community and I look forward to voting for those submissions!
For those who are interested, I wrote a web scraper to collect the number of votes, views, and remixes from all participants with 4 or more submissions. Run the attached script to collect the data and to produce several plots of the data.
Update: LeaderBoardScraper.m has been updated to version 2.0. (Oct 31, 2021)
That is a great script! Interesting analysis and also a very useful tutorial on how to grab data from the web. Thanks!
Are we going to pretend that this is still a constructive contest?
Most of the top leaderboard has pretty obviously reached their spot by having n other self-owned or befriended accounts vote for their k entries - which is pretty effective given that k can be any arbitrary number, or if n is shamelessly high.
It seems like a few top contestants are repeatedly posting plagiarised remixes of old (original) codes of other contestants. Can there be a way to discard remixes that are too similar to the original? Otherwise original thoughtful clever works are dumped under those meta codes.
Thanks, Ratul. Some new participants might not know the difference between a remix and a new entry. Therefore, we have a tool that can easily convert an entry into a remix. Simply let us know and we can take care of it.
Hi Chen. I guess the user Me Nazmul Islam has repeatedly copied one of my submissions and is misteriously receiving several hundreds of votes, with not that many views. I wish I had so many votes on mine 🤣, at least to win one of your fabulous t-shirts 👕!
Thanks for reporting it out. This is very helpful for us to validate entries after the contest ends.
Thank you Chen. For example please take a look at 1. Pulse by Murty PLN (posted few minutes ago). it is a remix of remix of remix of an original code which doesn't look so different. This increases the remix depth of the original code without much change.
2. The 4 entries after Pulse (all by Murty PLN) are similar remixes of old entries. Parachute by Murty PLN and HOT AIR Baloon by KSSV are very similar.
Thanks again for looking into these.
If you have not done so already, do yourself a favor and sort all entries by views instead of votes. This seems to remain the best way to quickly find creative entries.
Or make something really good that many people vote for.
I agree. But ignoring the fact that submitting more works will lead to winning is mischievous.
Seems like submitting a lot of work is the only way to win this.
