After 7 weeks of fun, the MATLAB Central community 20th anniversary contests have concluded! Together, we shared the art of MATLAB and contributed to the battle against the global pandemic. See the fantastic stats below.
- 1,700 entries created and 24,000 votes cast in MATLAB Mini Hack
- 6,300 tasks completed in Treasure Hunt
- $17,000 raised for Direct Relief
MATLAB Mini Hack Winners - Week 4
In Week 4, we invited the MATLAB Graphics team to help judge the entries. As the authors of the MATLAB functions used in every entry, they made sure every entry selected used a unique graphics function or technique from the other winners. Here are their choices:
1. Umbrellas by Shanshan Wang
Comment: Cool use of 'swarmchart' to make art from distributions; Only use of one of our newest graphics functions
2. Happy Sheep by Victoria
Comment: Cute!
3. Alien Giant by Jenny Bosten
Comment: Original idea, well textured, and efficient code
4. 3D Ultrasound by Adam Danz
Comment: Replicate source material very well. Effective use of lighting and material. Overall, impressive to produce this image given the limitation
5. Sunset in the Savanna by Sebastian Kraemer
Comment: Looks cool! Nice mix of 'image', 'fill' and 'scatter' commands.
6. Night Flight by Ratul Das
Comment: original; clever use of 'rectangle'
7. Lantern #2 by Tim
Comment: Nice use of 'getframe' to create a texture for 'surf' for a compelling picture
8. Geometric Design (6) by Daniel Pereira
Comment: Looks like some walls at MathWorks
9. Rosette 1313 by Alex P
Comment: Looks cool! Nice use of 'pcolor'
10. Mandelbrot contour by Sumihiro
Comment: Best use of contour!
11. Aim High by Murty PLN
Comment: Largest number of unique graphics objects for the Mini Hack (plot, patch,stairs,stem,text)
In the spirit of Mini Hack, the MATLAB Graphics team also created several cool graphs about the contest. Facing a similar space limit, I have picked only 2.
Bonus Prize Winners - Week 4
Congratulations to our 5 winners for their dual participation in the Treasure Hunt and the MATLAB Mini Hack. Yogiraj Bhagavatula, Pramod Devireddy, Devika U, FruitsLord, and Augusto Mazzei.
Lucky voters - Week 4
Congratulations to the lucky voters who cast the 12000th vote (Gordg Garin), 12500th vote (Eder Esteban Reyes), 13000th vote (Peram Balakrishna), 13500th vote (Emerson Nithiyaraj), 14000th vote(Sekar Naai), 14500th vote (Arika Amasarao), 15000th vote (Nikita Yakovlev), 15500th vote (Kesava Rao), and 16000th vote (Kundi Chandra Sekhar).
Grant Prize Winners
Finally, after validating entries and votes, we have picked the grand prize winners. We appreciate the time and effort you spent and the awesome entries you created. Huge congratulations!
1. Top 10 Authors of most voted entries
Each author will receive 5 customized T-shirts with the winning image and your name on the back of the T-shirts. You can choose the sizes and share them with your family or friends.
- Ciro Bermudez
- Jenny Bosten
- Adam Danz
- Jr
- Maximilian Schönau
- KSSV
- Dr Raveendranathan K C
- taoizm
- Sebastian Kraemer
- Victoria
2. Top 10 Authors with most total votes
Top 10 contestants on the leaderboard will each get an Amazon gift card. The top 3 winners on the leaderboard will also earn special virtual badges.
- Ciro Bermudez
- KSSV
- Juan Villacrés
- Murty PLN
- Pink_panther
- Jenny Bosten
- KARUPPASAMYPANDIYAN M
- Jr
- Adam Danz
- Victoria
On behalf of the MATLAB Central community team, we thank you for joining our celebration of the MATLAB Central community’s 20th anniversary with us in the past 7 weeks. We hope you enjoyed these contests and look forward to seeing you in next year’s contests. Question: “What contests would you like to see next?”
16 Comments
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I would like to express my great respect to MATLAB inventor Cleve Moler, my gratitude to the organizers of this nice contest, and my congratulations to all the winners! I'm happy to take part in this competition and to win! I would like also to express my appreciation to our post-graduate student Andrey Tarasov who inspired me for several entries and to all the people (colleagues, students, family, friends, and strangers) who supported me and likes my pictures.
I'm glad if our contributions will help in the battle against the global pandemic.
I also voted for the other participants. My favorites are Jenny Bosten, Jr , and Pink_panther creations. Also I like pale blue dot image and many others.
Next year I would like to see some surprise contest from MathWorks! All the contests were interesting. I liked the contests which were several years ago when it was one very complex problem to solve. Last year the contest was nice also. This year it is more accessible for everybody. I hope it will be many interesting and fun MATLAB contests ahead. Happy MATLAB Central community 20th Anniversary!
I would like to extend my special thanks to the sheep inspired me for the entry Happy Sheep!. My sheep are happy to receive recognition as "Cute!".
Thank you, friends!
I think the animation of the heart would not be very complex. It is a nice idea. First I made the Taubin's heart by formulas, and then I noticed it was already very similar existing entry by KARUPPASAMYPANDIYAN M , so I made a remix. I also like fractals. My first entries are fractals.
I spent two days putting the sheep into 280 symbols of the MATLAB code! It was ready only in the last night of the contest. The more precise version in comments for the Happy Sheep! is about thousand symbols.
Most probably, that MATLAB group in Facebook didn't get me many votes, it was more from the known people. It is strange that we met also there with Jr! I'm happy we've both won! This is wonderful!
Congratulations on winning the prize, I really like the photo of your real-world sheep. And thank you for mentioning me as one of your favorite creators. I also like your "Taubin's heart', maybe in the next contest, you can make pumping animations. I am going to spend more time with Fractals, it is a wonderful world.
Thanks to the graphics team for the data! It's interesting, though unsurprising, that three of the top four functions were related to circular / spherical math. I wonder if "i" is a confound and that the analysis included variable names named i. While several users used imaginary numbers for plotting, I don't recall seeing it used as often as several of the functions to the right of "i" in the plot.
I'm also dying to know how those data were collected. I've often thought about writing an m-file scraper to survey function use but never got off the ground with it (I'd love to hear from someone here or in a PM).
Adam -
Good catch: this was indeed i as a an imaginary, but I made a little mistake in the label for this chart: this is the number of uses of the functions not the number entries. That probably makes some sense (trig functions were popular, but show up higher on this chart because they were often used multiple times in the same entry). I asked Chen to update the chart with the corrected y-axis label and I'm hoping to follow up with lots more charts...I even did a little breakdown of the most common variable names!
But for a preview, here are the total counts of unique function uses (i.e. entries), you can see that functions which were likely to only be called once get a rank increase and as you guessed i is way lower.
Thanks for the update, Dave. I'm looking forward to seeing the variable name distribution!
Dear host, I checked my community badge, I only have one badge from September 2021 Treasure hunt. I know you said badges to only top 3 leaders, but can we get some kind of badge showing we spent time in MiniHack, although not top 3 ?
Congrats all winners. Will Mathworks consider publishing a booklet with all codes, pics and name of the authors? A digital booklet should also be fine. I learnt a lot of new commands through this challenge. Any newbie, who wants to learn Matlab can learn in a fun way. Imagine less than 280 characters and beautiful images. Just a suggestion. @Chen Li
This is a VERY inspiring idea. I'd love to hear more from other community members to understand the level of interest.
Good idea. I think it should be an e-book with simple layout showing the image and the block of code and a QR code to the submission, perhaps.
Congrats on all who participated, I certainly learned a lot of programming techniques, and it was an intensive contest. My idea of next contest will be making animations along with sound generated in MATLAB (via MIDI or wav), maybe limited to 500 characters and 30 seconds. Hoping it is anonymously judged by a panel of randomly selected MATLAB user/artist.
Thank you very much, Matlab team!
I'll leave here some ideas for the next contest, which I believe could improve our experience and fun as well:
1. Limited entries for each participant. Maybe give each one 3 or 5 possibilities, all could be deleted after submission, but only a fixed number for each one. This could reduce the number of entries, but would improve a lot the quality of works and avoid so many nonsense entries.
2. I think the remixing idea was very very cool, I interacted with the community and felt challenged and inspired by some of them. But, it would be much better to have some criteria about it. Like a minimum percentage of the code to be changed to classify it as a nice remix, not just a "color changed plot". And self-remixing could be prohibited next time as well. I guess.
3. I really appreciate the weekly prizes, I think it's a way that you had to recognize the most interesting works regardless of the number of votes, and in my opinion, it could be the only way to give all prizes in the contest given the doubtful number of votes on less interesting works (and this is not a subjective thing, clearly).
4. Or, if you really want to go crazy haha I absolutely have no problems with open voting for everyone. I felt this contest stayed quite closed to Matlab's community, and on the other side, people like my mother, or a friend who never programmed in life, could see it's not an alien thing but it can be nice and interesting. And beautiful. So, make it really open for anyone, without the necessity to create an account and all, so we can share it more openly without the necessity to explain how to proceed for voting. I'm a bit popular on Twitter (cof cof) but I thought, like... well, If I ask my followers to vote on me, I'll have to make additional posts about how to create an account, explain it to everyone, somewhat laborious...
That's it! I had so much fun and now I'm sad because the contest is over! Make it every anniversary, I'd love it!
I agree with Sudharsana and like your suggestions except for the last. Open voting would be far too easy for people to cheat which we all know would happen. Also, I believe view counts included viewers who were no logged in so view count is a good metric that includes outside viewers.
I agree to all your points. Except to the last one. Introverts seldom have friends or followers, so it may be affect the number of votes. Chances are sometimes very good work might get votes, because he or she was not active in social media and mediocre works will get a lot of votes because they are lot active in social media or had time to create proxy accounts. From Matlab point of view every visitor who comes to vote could be inspired to use Matlab later, so Matlab might consider that has an advertisement and person who brings in more people might require appreciation. So Mathworks might be at advantage if they open it for voting for all. But all other points 100% agree.
I received my t-shirt today, thanks for the organization of the event!
