Spring 2010 MATLAB Contest, April 28 - May 5
in [Matlab]
|
Prev: Single number into vector elements
Next: neural network
From: Nathan on 7 May 2010 07:56 Hannes, great commentary on the contest in your last few posts. It's the "common sense" bits of the contest that I love.You have much better articulated what I was trying to describe as abstract problem-solving... the flashes of insight and logic, sometimes obvious in hindsight, that blow the problem open, only to be outmoded the next day by something equally elegant. Judging by the discussions, this is the stuff that draws most applause from across the community, and what most players aspire to. One nice feature of the old contests (all-daylight) was that for the first few hours, code was just tens of lines long. It was easy for anybody to observe and take part in the genesis of prize-winning code. How about a short opening Daylight phase, somewhere between 3 and 24 hours long, with a prize at the end of it? Newbies could work on a blank canvas, and if this phase is short enough, ambitious players will be motivated to hide their best ideas until twilight. "Hannes Naudé" <naude.jj+matlab(a)gmail.com> wrote in message <hs0os0$22r$1(a)fred.mathworks.com>... > @Alan: I just thought of a great way in which your bot could be productively used in future contests. The fact that the new interface allows us to leave comments on other submissions implies that one could create a cleanup bot that would automatically post as a comment on a submission, an autocleaned version of that submission. YES! I'd volunteer for this. Alan...? > You can't get pills for stupid. how true Nathan
From: Hannes Naudé on 7 May 2010 09:33 Nathan"One nice feature of the old contests (all-daylight) was that for the first few hours, code was just tens of lines long. It was easy for anybody to observe and take part in the genesis of prize-winning code. How about a short opening Daylight phase, somewhere between 3 and 24 hours long, with a prize at the end of it? Newbies could work on a blank canvas, and if this phase is short enough, ambitious players will be motivated to hide their best ideas until twilight." Love this idea. It could even be a full day. If darkness is still 1 day and twilight is still 1 day then this pushes twilight into the weekend, which is also something many people have been requesting. If the code at the end of 1st daylight is good enough it will probably be used as a base for a winning twilight submission, so those trying to get (back) into the game at the start of second daylight will at least not be dealing with something totally unfamiliar.
From: Alan Chalker on 7 May 2010 14:09 Stefan: "Personally, I think the "big" prizes of the matlab contests are the darkness and twilight awards and I have the deepest respect for all those people who have won these before .... Therefore I would love to have another phase after twilight, something like a "reverse twilight" where you can see the code of entries, but not the score" I wholeheartedly agree! This is an interesting idea I haven't seen proposed before. Hannes: "Please don't take anything I write as a negative comment regarding your involvement. You are probably the most involved player in the entire contest and make great contributions contest after contest. If you were no longer involved it would be a great loss to this community. I'm merely suggesting that some of your techniques are extremely disruptive and need to be toned down or abandoned." I really appreciate the fact that we can have a civil discourse yet very differing opinions on these issues (it happens far to rarely in modern society) and thanks for the compliments. I am very vocal and think everyone knows where I stand on things. I'm just trying to advocate for the position that if change is going to happen, it should be on the 'toned down' end of the spectrum, not the 'abandoned' end. Jan: "So, inspired by Alans description I will try to run all passed algorithms over the weekend on the testset (3000-4000 entries times ~1 minute makes 2-3 days running time) using urlopen and some hand crafted matlab script." This will be an interesting experiment. To help you, I've already downloaded all of the entries and data that goes with them and uploaded a compressed version along with a small 'helper' function to the file exchange. I'm note sure when it will get approved (Helen and team perhaps you can expediate it?), but you can check my profile to see if it has been. Alternatively you can directly email me and I'll send it to you. Hannes: "But even when I do the responsible thing and go to bed at a reasonable time (I'm no longer a student after all) I still have problems switching my brain off and falling asleep. So I lie awake for hours thinking about the problem and possible new approaches. Sleep deprivation is an occupational hazard in this contest. " I'm glad I'm not the only one obsessed enough to have this regularly happen;) I know my wife is always glad when the contest end rolls around! Hannes: "I just thought of a great way in which your bot could be productively used in future contests. The fact that the new interface allows us to leave comments on other submissions implies that one could create a cleanup bot that would automatically post as a comment on a submission, an autocleaned version of that submission. " This is an EXCELLENT idea and I'm all in for it. I particularly like the fact that it can involve the community between now and the next contest as a way to improve the overall experience. A couple things: 1. The comment field is currently limited to 1000 characters. Is there any way the Contest team can increase that? If not, we won't be able to post the full code but could post other valuable info. However the system also allows for multiple comments, so I could break longer pieces into smaller chunks and post them. 2. Since starting small is going to be best, it'd help if people could help id simple things for me to do and example entries for me to look at. Heck even some psuedocode to accomplish the task would be nice. 3. Which would be better: posting everything under one comment (and perhaps posting things just as comments embedded in the code), or breaking items up into multiple comments (i.e. one comment is cleaned code, one comment is ids of major code blocks and originators, etc etc)?
From: Hannes Naudé on 7 May 2010 14:27 Alan, glad to see you're testing the placing of comments on the site. I take this to mean you are keen on the proposed idea. Are you going to go it alone or are you keen on volunteers to write modules for the system? P.S. Thanks for introducing me to cURL. Am playing with it now (which is how I noticed your test comments. Got going a lot quicker than I did with either WaTiN or System.Web. I'm guessing that's because it does not require me to learn a whole new language. ;-) Cheers H
From: Helen Chen on 7 May 2010 14:35
"Alan Chalker" <alancNOSPAM(a)osc.edu> wrote in message news:hs1l00$mtn$1(a)fred.mathworks.com... > This will be an interesting experiment. To help you, I've already > downloaded all of the entries and data that goes with them and uploaded a > compressed version along with a small 'helper' function to the file > exchange. I'm note sure when it will get approved (Helen and team perhaps > you can expediate it?), but you can check my profile to see if it has > been. Alternatively you can directly email me and I'll send it to you. > Shari beat me to this one. Your file has been published. > This is an EXCELLENT idea and I'm all in for it. I particularly like the > fact that it can involve the community between now and the next contest as > a way to improve the overall experience. A couple things: > > 1. The comment field is currently limited to 1000 characters. Is there > any way the Contest team can increase that? If not, we won't be able to > post the full code but could post other valuable info. However the system > also allows for multiple comments, so I could break longer pieces into > smaller chunks and post them. > I'll share this with the contest development team. Thanks! Helen |