MATLAB Programming Contest Winner Announced

gooru writes "The MATLAB programming contest winner has been announced. It is a semi-annual programming contest organized by the MathWorks. What makes the contest truly interesting is the final phase is open source. Contestants may submit as many entries as they want and can tweak other entries."

Be Wary of Conclusions about Programming Contests

[reporter]

Invariably, in contests of this nature, people are apt to draw specious conclusions from the results of the contest. In a recent programming contest involving teams of students from across the globe, the American teams performed poorly. Professor Matloff then rebutted the cries for government intervention to increase the quality and quantity of computer-science students [com.com].

Now, this Matlab contest is positioned to lead to the same silly cries. So, allow me to present a link to Professor Matloff's excellent article [com.com] to head off any silly speculations about the decline of American technical prowess.

TLL280 in 13 seconds?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess for their speed programming award they are allowed to have prior source. If this wasn't the case, the author would have written it at 393 characters per second!

I'm beginning to wonder if this was rather some sort of PR effort rather than a true programming challenge.

Re:Down with MATLAB

[Strontium-90]

If you're doing symbolic work, then Mathematica is the program to go with. But if you're doing numerical linear algebra and either don't need the speed of C/C++/Fortran or don't want to deal with those languages, it's kind of hard to beat Matlab. One nice combo is Maple/Matlab. Maple can call Matlab for numerical linear algebra work, and Matlab can call Maple for symbolic work.

Despite all of the people who complain about Matlab being unstable and using up resources, I've always found that running the command-line version of Matlab is fast and stable. The GUI version has some nice features, but they usually aren't essential to the work that I do.

I Always Write my MATLAB Open Source

[schestowitz]

All my MATLAB code is Open Source. And I am the most popular author (jointly with Luigi Rosa) this month. http://www.mathworks.nl/matlabcentral/reports/file exchange/top10Authors/ [mathworks.nl]

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

When did Matlab become commercial?

[Asprin]

When I last used Matlab, we used it just for the matrix calculator and, IIRC, it was free. When did it become a commercial product? Did I miss something or was just not paying attention back then?

not a troll -- MW is more evil than M$

[EccentricAnomaly]

An open source matlab contest is the same animal as if Microsoft held an open source Excel or Visual Basic contest... except that Matlab costs a lot more, and Mathworks tend to be a lot more evil in its licensing terms.

Matlab costs about $3500... but at my work, somehow it costs $70,000 a year because of some weird ass licensing scheme matlworks sticks large government labs with. I've tired to convince my project that for that money it makes more sense just to hire programmers to add whatever features we need to octave and go tell mathworks to fuck themselves.

Oh, and by the way... all of that money is still not enough to get you bug reports noticed. For that you need to pay for some sort of premiere program.

Re:not a troll -- MW is more evil than M$

[nicsterrr]

It's even worse than this.. The origins of Mathworks was an open source system created by an academic and improved by other contributors.

One day a business man came along and convinced the creator to leave academia in order to exploit his open source creation by closing the source and selling it to existing users.

Ten years later, Mathworks is a semi-monopoly in numeric computing in academia.

Re:Matlab doesn't measure up

[Sycraft-fu]

Well guess what? I'm going to have to say you probably are wrong. I personally don't use Matlab but I support those that do in an educational setting. Our department makes extensive use of Matlab, we use it for instruciton, we use it for research. Now research groups espically are always money hungry. They always want more than they have so they try to save as they can. We have many who use Linux rather than Solaris to save on hardware and software fees.

None the less, we don't see Octave or Numerical Python used. Ever. In any group. It's Matlab or get out. The usage keeps increasing so the department will be scaling up the number of licenses we have. It's mostly core licenses as well. We do have some toolkits, but those are generally only a couple liceses for specific groups. Overall, it's the Matlab package that gets used.

Now I'm sure there are situations where these alternatives work, but I'd put money on the fact that they don't hold a candle to Matlab overall. Why? Well if they did, they'd be moving up, if not taking over.

I mean look at Firefox. HEre you are talking browsers, this is a market where you are dealing with lowest common denominator, users that have NO computer skills. Here the slightest change, even a purely cosmetic one can make someone refuse to switch. Yet, Firefox has been taking off in a big way. It probably won't become dominant for the reaons mentioned, but it's a serious threat.

Now one would think Matlab alternatives would be much better off. I mean here we are talking about techinal users. Electrical engineers use Matlab and so on. If you could offer something that's superior, free, and customizable, well the'd be jumping over in droves. Hell I'd expect it to be the standard, or at least on it's way.

Alas that's not what we see.

I personally see a lot of paralles to the audio world, something I work with personally. There's lots of OSS audio stuff out there, and there are those that push it as though it were all you need. However when I use it, I find it severly lacking. It cannot do what teh commercial software does. Even in many cases where it can, it does it far inferior either quality wise or ease of use wise or feature wise. It being free doesn't make up for what it lacks.

Re:contests... octave..

[Roger_Wilco]

Octave uses GiNaC [ginac.de] for its symbolic stuff. Currently, part of why Octave's symbolics aren't better, is not that the library doesn't do it, but that the "glue" hasn't been written.

What are you waiting for? :)

Re:not a troll -- MW is more evil than M$

[kd3bj]

That's not all... When the original open source matlab was proprietarized, it was dumbed down in certain critical ways in order to make it more marketable. For example, in the original Matlab, functions of matricies always performed the function on the matrix. In today's commercial matlab, sometimes the function acts on the matrix, othertimes on the elements. Which way this goes seems to depend more on marketing than mathematical rigor. They actually went in and tangled the semantics so as to sell more copies to the lowest common math user.

Thus we have yet another example of how commercial competition doesn't lead to the best product.

Re:contests... octave..

[smcdow]

8) I've never looked at my License file. I never track what it's doing. This has never been an issue.

You've obviously never deployed nor administered a site license for MATLAB. Talk about a ROYAL PITA. Your time will come.

Re:Matlab doesn't measure up

[L7_]

Its the same argument that people give that still use Fortran. Most (scientific) departments have professors that make extensive use of Fortran for research and in thier instruction.

Its what the instructors learned originally and it 'can get the job done', but it is not neccesarily the best solution in whatever terms that you measure success. Professors use it because that is what they know. People don't jump all over new technologies because the original learning curve even if is 'superior, free and customizable'.

I think the same can be said of your department's use of Matlab. You have a set of users already using it with a set of code that already does a lot of things that they find useful; if they switched to another platform thousands of lines of Matlab code would need to be re-written. Since Matlad 'still works' they will never switch due to the legacy it has.

Interesting!

[Mr. Underbridge]

In my Machine Learning class at Portland State U, we've been using the Netlab toolbox from Aston University Neural Computing Research Group, which is a set of Matlab libraries and programs. I haven't used Matlab's own neural network tools or done any of this stuff in my working life, but NetLab is at least a good learning tool, and is itself GPL.

That's an interesting package. I'll guess that it isn't as full-featured as the Matlab version, and in fact seems to have a somewhat different focus. I'd almost say it's a fairly decent complement to the Matlab toolkit, actually.

Naturally the big stumbling block for corporate development would be the GPL, but it is free, so one can't complain. Still, it'd be nice to see somebody compete with Matlab. A lot of times it's the toolkits, not base matlab, that ends up costing $$$$$. Usually when someone makes a good add-on toolkit, Matlab buys them out, as with Kohonen's SOM toolkit, but to his credit he does still release a GPL version.

There are some things in the Netlab toolkit that might do what I need for some current projects at work, though, so thanks!