Cody Contest 2025 has concluded! Winners Announced
Chen Lin
about 17 hours ago
Latest activity Edit by Vasilis Bellos
42 minutes ago
The Cody Contest 2025 has officially wrapped up! Over the past 4 weeks, more than 700 players submitted over 20,000 solutions. In addition, participants shared 20+ high-quality Tips & Tricksarticles—resources that will benefit Cody users for years to come.
Now it’s time to announce the winners.
🎉 Week 4 winners:
Weekly Prizes for Contest Problem Group Finishers:
@JKMSMKJ, @Yu Zhang, @Oliver Jaros, @Pauli Huusari, @Karl, @Marcos Silveira, @goc3, @Ildeberto de los Santos Ruiz, @Norberto, @Eric
Weekly Prizes for Contest Problem Group Solvers:
Weekly Prizes for Tips & Tricks Articles:
This week’s prize goes to @WANG Zi-Xiang. See the comments from our judge and problem group author @Matt Tearle:
‘We had a lot of great tips for solving Cody problems in general and the contest problems specifically. But we all know there are those among us who, having solved the problem, still want to tinker and make their code better. There are different definitions of "better", but code size remains the base metric in Cody. Enter Wang Zi-Xiang who compiled a list of many tips for reducing Cody size. This post also generated some great discussion (even prompting our insane autocrat, Lord Ned himself, to chime in). I particularly like the way that, while reducing Cody size often requires some arcane tricks that would normally be considered bad coding practice, the intellectual activity of trying to "game the system" makes you consider different programming approaches, and sometimes leads you to learn corners of MATLAB that you didn't know.’
🏆 Grand Prizes for the Main Round
Team Relentless Coders:
2nd Place: @Roberto
Team Creative Coders:
Team Cool Coders
Congratulations to all! Securing a top position on the leaderboard requires not only advanced MATLAB skills but also determination and consistency throughout the four-week contest. You will receive Amazon gift cards.
🥇 Winning Team
The competition was incredibly tight—we even had to use the tie-breaker rule.
Both Team Cool Coders and Team Relentless Coders achieved 16 contest group finishers. However, the last finisher on Cool Coders completed the problem group at 1:02 PM on Dec 7, while the last finisher on Relentless Coders finished at 9:47 PM the same day.
Such a close finish! Congratulations to Team Cool Coders, who have earned the Winning Team Finishers badge.
🎬 Bonus Round
Invitations have been sent to the 6 players who qualified for the Bonus Round. Stay tuned for updates—including the Big Watch Party afterward!
Congratulations again to all winners! We’ll be reaching out after the contest ends. It has been an exciting, rewarding, and knowledge-packed journey.
See you next year!
3 Comments
Time Descending
Congratulations to everyone for this year's very successful contest! A big thank you to the organizers and curators @Chen Lin, @Matt Tearle and everyone else involved for all their work behind the scenes and for providing us with this fascinating problem group. And of course, to all the participants who put in the time, shared their knowledge and helped keep this competition consistently interesting throughout these past few weeks.
A special shoutout to my Creative teammates @Stefan Abendroth and @WANG Zi-Xiang, as well as the very Cool Coder @JKMSMKJ for their invaluable contributions, persistence and enthusiasm in optimizing the solution to the Clueless problem. Apart from all of the amazing vectorization, linear and logical indexing, operator precedence etc. tricks that Zi-Xiang mentioned in his incredible article, what truly made this spontaneous collaboration shine was that whenever we would get stuck, one of us would come up with a motivating new trick to move the solution forward, which in turn enabled other sections of the code to be further optimized. In the end, we managed to reduce the size of the solution down to just 152 characters - which to me seems unreal for this kind of problem! The final product is a thing of beauty, and I am truly amazed by your coding proficiency, insight and ingenuity. Above all, this would not have been possible without fully understanding the mechanics of this complex problem - and that's where, as Matt pointed out, the very fruitful discussions that resulted from this effort culminated: while the size of the solution is by no means an objectively good metric for good coding practices, that does not mean that hacking a problem is the easy way out. On the contrary, it often requires creativity, a deep understanding of the problem, and mastery of some of the most difficult concepts of a programming language. And by reaching that level, one can already start to discern what truly constitutes good practices and apply them where it counts - for they have acquired the critical thinking necessary to complement their coding skills. And personally, I believe that this is one of the most important concepts to be gained from Cody.
See you all next year!
Hi @Chen Lin,Thank you for the exciting wrap-up and for all the hard work that went into organizing this contest! It’s been an amazing experience, and I’m grateful to have participated.
I just wanted to check on something—while team creative coders team ( Week 3 Winners Announced! Final Week to Play and Win ) including my self have completed the contest problem group and seen the announcement of the winners and prizes, we haven’t yet received the Cody Contest 2025 Finishers badge. Is there any update on when these will be distributed to all participants who finished the problem group?
Also, congrats to @WANG Zi-Xiang for his contributions and everyone else who helped out their teams. They put tremendous efforts and provide excellent tips and tricks.
Thanks again for such a great contest. Looking forward to future opportunities to participate!
Hi Umar. I'm glad you enjoyed the contest. Thanks for being a top competitor. The virtual badges will be awarded shortly.
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