News Archive

Aug 2, 2010

• Grand Prize Winner: Ryan Tarpine, Computer Science at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA

• 2^nd Prize Winner: Mstislav Elagin, Mathematics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany

• 3^rd Prize Winner: Joel Hough, Computer Science at Salt Lake Community College, Kaysville Utah, USA

The Judges' motivation on selecting Ryan Tarpine's submission as the Grand Prizer winner reads as follows:

"Although Ryan was new to APL, he writes that he does most of his programming in functional languages, and there is clear evidence in his code that this helped him put his best foot forward when taking advantage of APL. Ryan's code was modularized in a way which allowed him to take advantage of operators including the power operator, to derive concise and elegant expressions. His code was a joy to read and looked as if it would be easy to maintain. For his efforts, Ryan will receive a trip to the APL 2010 conference in Berlin in addition to the cash prize".

The Judges' motivation on selecting the 2nd and 3rd Prize winners reads as follows:

"Mstislav's code was very much "to the point" - and very readable. His solution to the timed task (VariableRiskFast) was the fastest, and he came very close to winning the first prize. In the end, Ryan's code was slightly more general and robust, and this allowed him to edge ahead in the final analysis. Mstislav will receive second prize".

"Joel demonstrated solid programming craftsmanship, which allowed him to take 3^rd place overall and do very well in the Rosetta challenge. Joel will receive third Prize as well as a prize for each Rosetta Challenge problem he won".

Rosetta Challenge Prize winners:

Animate a Pendulum: Won by Joel Hough who not only solved the problem correctly but went the extra distance to animate the various vectors of force and motion acting upon the pendulum. A screenshot of his graphic is shown above.

The Knapsack problem: Also won by Joel Hough who used a recursive dynamic programming approach to solve the problem. Honorable mention goes to Horacio Cisneros for a very compact and fast solution.

The Happy Numbers problem: Was won by, you guessed it, Joel Hough. His solution was not only well documented and correct but ran twice as fast as any other submission.

The Hofstader-Conway problem - was the most CPU intensive of the Rosetta Code problems. Of the correct submissions, Ryan Tarpine's solution ran 3 orders of magnitude faster than its closest competitor.

The Monty Hall problem: Joel Hough completed his near sweep of the Rosetta Code problems by also winning the Monty Hall problem. Not only did his solution make effective use of dynamic functions, it ran quickly and was very well commented.

Presentation Prize:
There were no entries in the category for the presentation prize, apparently all the entrants were true geeks, who concentrated on computing the right answers without thinking about how to present them.

Special Effort Award:
The judges have awarded an special effort award to Alexander Ivanov, who is doing nuclear research at the Moscow Institute for Physical Research. Alexander submitted solutions to all of the questions in the main competition AND all the Rosetta Code problems. Alexander narrowly missed out on winning several of the other prizes, and we would like to recognize his efforts.

NOTE: The winners have been notified directly by Dyalog Ltd. We hope to be able to feature a profile on each of them in the near future as well as their comments on how they each went about addressing the individual programming tasks, so check back soon.

Comment from the Judges

The Judges would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who submitted entries for this year's Programming Competition. It was both interesting to see the variety of solutions and exciting to read the entrants' reactions to learning and using APL. We would also like to thank those who referred the contestants to the competition. This year's contest did not have as many entrants as last year's. We believe that the change in the format and content of the challenge may have contributed to this. Nonetheless, the reactions from those who submitted solutions were unanimously favorable. We hope to take the lessons learned from the last two years to make the 2011 competition even better.