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The MathWorks Announces Winner of MATLAB Central Online Programming Contest

Participants Test Their Programming Savvy, Learn MATLAB Tips from Peers, and Compete for Bragging Rights within the Worldwide MATLAB User Community

SÈVRES, France. - (19 janv 2010)

News Facts

• The MathWorks today announced the results of its 20^th online programming contest, open to MATLAB programmers around the world.

• Alfonso Nieto-Castañón, a PhD in cognitive and neural systems, was the winner of the programming challenge posed by The MathWorks on MATLAB Central, an online open exchange for the MATLAB and Simulink user community.

• The challenge, titled “Color Bridge,” was a path finding problem that required MATLAB users to create the most efficient path of colored squares to connect two points.  Making the challenge considerably more difficult, each of the squares was assigned a point value, and the winning program needed to find a path that resulted in the lowest number of total points.

• The online programming contest is both competitive and collaborative; Nieto-Castañón’s winning entry was a successful collaboration among many programmers, as participants continually built on and improved upon others’ submissions.

• Winning entry details: Nieto-Castañón ran a set of alternative search algorithms on every board. The algorithms assessed three basic measures: the true cost associated with a given color change; the distance to target measure, representing the minimal number of color changes necessary to reach the target at any step of the search; and the number of clusters of each color remaining in the board. His final, winning entry implemented five alternative search algorithms, each with up to three possible variations (when avoiding one color all together).

• MATLAB Central Programming Contests are held online semi-annually by The MathWorks for its 1.3 million active MATLAB users.  Each contest presents a different problem to be solved within the course of a week.  The MathWorks contest server automatically tests and scores each entry for correctness and efficiency. All code entered in the contest is immediately made available to all the contestants, giving it a distinctive wiki-like open source flavor.

Quotes

• “With each contest, I am amazed and impressed with our users’ submissions and participation. The MATLAB community has this incredible enthusiasm, following the contest throughout the week.  Entries build on each other, as each entrant pushes the contest solution forward. Sometimes a small programming change can lead to a huge improvement in the solution.” – Ned Gulley, The MathWorks
  
• “This was my fifth time participating in a MATLAB contest and as always, it was an incredibly fun learning experience. Although I was only able to participate in the contest’s beginning and end stages, I came out of it with a bag full of new tricks, algorithms and implementation ideas.  I cannot wait to see the new problem that the MATLAB Central team comes up with in the next contest for us!” - Alfonso Nieto-Castañón

Multimedia Content

• Screenshots of crowdsourcing at work and submissions over time
• Contest statistics

Tag Words

MATLAB, contest, programming challenge

About The MathWorks

The MathWorks is the leading developer of mathematical computing software. MATLAB, the language of technical computing, is a programming environment for algorithm development, data analysis, visualization, and numeric computation. Simulink is a graphical environment for simulation and Model-Based Design of multidomain dynamic and embedded systems. Engineers and scientists worldwide rely on these product families to accelerate the pace of discovery, innovation, and development in automotive, aerospace, electronics, financial services, biotech-pharmaceutical, and other industries. MathWorks products are also fundamental teaching and research tools in the world's universities and learning institutions. Founded in 1984, The MathWorks employs more than 2,100 people in 15 countries, with headquarters in Natick, Massachusetts, USA. For additional information, visit www.mathworks.com.

MATLAB and Simulink are registered trademarks of The MathWorks, Inc. See www.mathworks.com/trademarks for a list of additional trademarks. Other product or brand names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

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