Week 3 winners announced. This week is the last week to vote on your favorite MATLAB images!
In Week 3, we passed several amazing milestones! 1,000 Participants in the Treasure Hunt , 1,000 ENTRIES and 10,000 votes in the MATLAB Mini Hack , and $10,000 charity donation from both contests! I recommend you read Ned Gulley’s recent blog post , which is a fantastic summary of the contest highlights.
During the last week of this contest, we strongly encourage you to inspire your colleagues, classmates, or friends to participate by either VOTING or CREATING entries. To add some fun, we will give out a T-shirt to LUCKY voters who cast:
- The 12000th vote
- The 12500th vote
- The 13000th vote
- The 13500th vote
- The 14000th vote
- The 14500th vote
- The 15000th vote
- The 15500th vote
- The 16000th vote
MATLAB Mini Hack Winners - Week 3
We’ve received many creative entries for our new categories. Congratulations to the winners! Each of you won a special edition T-shirt:
Greg, entry: better Christmas tree , category: Holidays
Ratul Das, entry: To All Pepperoni Lovers , category: Food
Peter Stampfli, entry: Louis V , category: Fractals
Adrien Leygue, entry: Stained Glass membrane , category: MathWorks Logo
Spencer Miesner, entry: ~Breathe~ , category: Album Cover
Stewart Thomas, entry: The only QR code you ever need , category: Black & White
Sebastian Kraemer, entry: sun , category: 3D
Jenny Bosten, entry: The joys of spring , category: Plant
Adam Danz, entry: MATropolis rooftop view , category: Illustration
Eric Ogier, entry: UFO , category: Fun
Simon Thor, entry: Mandelbrot in 52 characters , category: Concise
Tim, entry: Low Tide , category: Realism
Bonus Prize Winners - Week 3
We are giving out additional giveaways to participants of both the Treasure Hunt and the MATLAB Mini Hack . Congratulations to our 5 winners. Each of you has also won a special edition T-shirt.
- Teodo
- Dyuman Joshi
- Shanshan Wang
- Nirvik Sinha
- Felipe Torres
Week 4
After the contest ends, we need additional time to validate entries for Grand Prize and Weekly Prize. The winners are expected to be announced within a couple of days after the contest ends. Thank you in advance for your patience.
20 Comments
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That's a great achievement so far. Thank you so much for sharing this statistic.
Well done to all the contestants! My favourite entries are Tim's Dunes on Mars and Adam Danz's A Time-Lapse of the Night Sky
My favorite pick is likely also Jenny Boston's Cumulus due to several reasons. Without particular order, my other favorites are Adam Danz's Night Sky, Tim's Dunes on Mars, taoizm's Collatz Feather and Maximilian Schönau's Dark Side.
Thanks! I think you and Adam should have another 20 or so characters and be allowed to submit grand finale's for the Matlab staff to judge
Ha! I was working on that "Craters" entry weeks ago and gave up at 355 chars. Then 1 hour before the competition was over I gave it another shot and worked it out with some small sacrifices. Thanks, Tim. I agree that your Dunes on Mars is really good, even realistic looking, and I also like your Textured Cube remix. It added a creative twist and I stared at it and the code for a while after you submitted it.
That's a great achievement so far. Thank you so much for sharing this statistic.
This competition has ruined me! I keep leaving all the spaces out in my regular coding
I've stopped including the 0 before decimals, which I hated before and now I don't seem to mind.
Here is my personal best of code shortening better not to use:
1.) Define row vectors as [1;2;9]' instead of [1,2,9] because it "saves" one character.
2.) Generate useless entries in a matrix because 2:3 requires two fewer characters than [2,1]
3.) Just do not take the real part of a complex array when plots do it for you (though you have to ignore their warning). After all, R=real(E);I=imag(E); has so many more characters than just I=E/i
4.) camva(n) is shorter than but kind of does the same as axis equal off
5.) Defining n=200 just to twice write n is one character more than just writing 200 twice.
6.) Never ever use more than one character for any variable.
7.) One does not need brackets in x.^-2
8.) min(x,10) overwrites entries in x which are NaN as 10. So there is not need to care about these entries.
9.) hold is a discount hold on
10.) Why use R^2 when you have C: r=abs(X+X'*i) is shorter than [~,r]=cart2pol(X,X').
But my favorite, which in the end was not even necessary, is to define recursive function handles by passing the function handle itself as an input argument as well as a dummy function that does not do anything to at some point stop the whole thing.
Sebastian, I thought for sure your Cherry blossom tree was going to win but your ethereal sphere series is also great.
Thanks! Even though it turned out unnecessary for the contest, I still like that you can just copy the block of code into the command window and run it.
Here is a slightly tweaked version of Savanna tree that works the same way. Though it's only close to 280 characters 😗.
figure;X=-10:.02:10;s=640./abs(X+1i*X'-3i);colormap([pink.*autumn;1,1,.9]);image(s);
hold;U=@(p)p+.5i*diff(p)*[4;0;4;4-1i+1i^cos(431*norm(p))^.5];
t=@(S,C)C{(abs(diff(S))<.01)+1}(U(S),C);f=@(P,C)[P(2);t(P(3:4),C);t(P(4:5),C);P(6)];
E=42*f(U(0:1),{f,@(P,C)[]});I=790-E/1i;fill(E+520,I,0);h=scatter(E+520,I,50,-14*abs(E));
alpha(h,.1);camva(3);
Theoretically, without breaking the contest rules since empty lines do not count towards the character limit, you could encode each around 52 bits as size of an empty n by 1 cell. Unfortunately, for each of these objects, you would indeed need to enter up to 2^52 empty lines.
Hooray! I am not joking, when I say I am putting this on my CV! :)
This Mini-Hack has been awesome! Has there been any discussion about including gifs/animations in 2026?
Thanks, Joel. I'm glad you enjoy the contest. Yes, we are looking for ideas for future contests.
More execution time please! Great job on curation / vote counting / everything.
