Spring 2010 MATLAB Contest, April 28 - May 5
in [Matlab]
|
Prev: Single number into vector elements
Next: neural network
From: Alan Chalker on 5 May 2010 20:12 "Hannes Naudé" <naude.jj+matlab(a)gmail.com> wrote in message <hrsqv3$m4a$1(a)fred.mathworks.com>... > > Take a closer look my friend, it's not as random as you might think. ;-) > > Cheers > H Hannes: Congrats on being the grand winner! It's nice to see that you were able to sneak in some fundamental solver changes at the last minute that leaped far ahead of everyone else (particularly since far too often last minute tweaking is what wins). Care to share any details of what you did?
From: Nicholas Howe on 5 May 2010 21:03 "Hannes Naudé" <naude.jj+matlab(a)gmail.com> wrote in message > Thanks. Unfortunately, in this case, "other techniques" refers to intentionally overfitting the dataset, something for which I have a deep seated dislike. But hey if you can't beat them, join them. Well, whatever you did, you did it better than everyone else. Well done! In the past they have sometimes awarded a generality prize by running the submissions on a brand new test set after the contest ends. I wonder if they'll do that this time around? I want to add my thanks to the Mathworks contest team. I think this was a great contest topic, very accessible and lots of fun to work on. The new contest machinery is very nice too. My one suggestion: in the past I think it was easier to diff two submissions; now I find it harder to find the link to do that. (Once I have the page up I can just replace the submission numbers in the URL.) Anyway, kudos to everyone involved in setting up this spring's contest!
From: Darren Rowland on 5 May 2010 21:59 Congratulations to Hannes and the other prize winners. And thanks to the contest team for a well organised contest.
From: Hannes Naudé on 6 May 2010 00:54 "Alan Chalker" <alancNOSPAM(a)osc.edu> wrote in message <hrt1gm$me7$1(a)fred.mathworks.com>... > "Hannes Naudé" <naude.jj+matlab(a)gmail.com> wrote in message <hrsqv3$m4a$1(a)fred.mathworks.com>... > > > > > Take a closer look my friend, it's not as random as you might think. ;-) > > > > Cheers > > H > > Hannes: Congrats on being the grand winner! It's nice to see that you were able to sneak in some fundamental solver changes at the last minute that leaped far ahead of everyone else (particularly since far too often last minute tweaking is what wins). Care to share any details of what you did? I don't mind at all. But it'll take me a while. So expect a post in the next few hours, but in the meantime I'd imagine you can have a lot of fun seeing whos the first to figure it out ;-). I'm afraid there were no fundamental solver changes. Last minute tweaking did win, just not random tweaking. My overfitting series of entries were designed to look like random variation, with the only parameter changing between them being a 20-bit binary key stored in a lookup table. One of them got a very good result and people are quick to accept that I got a lucky key. In fact there are only 8 keys in the entire keyspace that would have defeated Sergey's top entry. That's a 1 in 131 071 chance. A clue that something was afoot can be found in the comment on the first line of the code which contains the result that it eventually achieved. A last few clues for anyone taking up the challenge to reverse engineer: Overfitting was based on information collected using the "Random Randomness" probe series which was in turn based on "Random Change" by Magnus. Sorry for not crediting correctly. Heat of battle and all that. Cheers H
From: srach on 6 May 2010 03:21
Congratulations to Hannes for a impressing win and also to Sergey for a very good second place. After all the automatic parameter tweaking, I would not have thought that such improvements of the score are still possible. And also congratulations to all the mid-contest price winners. It was again a great contest; I liked the problem very much as well as the new contest machinery. Especially the 10 entries per minute barrier is a nice improvement, although it did not seem to work for all of us. ;) Many thanks to the people at mathworks who organized this great event and, of course, to all the participants who made it such an enjoyable time full of new things to learn. On a side note: will there be high resolution versions of the contest badges suitable for tattooing? :D Hope to see you all in Fall. Best regards Stefan |