[appleeaters]blah

This is pathetic.
1 Month.

Grrr...

I don't believe Matt is getting paid to do this... give me a break!

Relax and join (most of) the rest of us who are patiently waiting!

-Jeff

I understand how that feels ... but to make it a fair contest and run each submission under the same conditions the computer would have to be doing nothing else, right?

So that means it would be tied up for as long as a 100 minutes for each submission, call it 2 hours.

I don't know how many submissions he has to run but if there were 50 that would take at least 100 hours of dedicated computer time.

And since he is a volunteer that means he is doing it in his spare time - maybe that would leave him about 4 hours each evening to work on this... if he doesn't date or eat meals... which is asking a lot of a volunteer.

Anyway, he probably does take meals and date, he might even have some other projects that need attention. Maybe if he is really dedicated he is knocking out five submissions a week, more on the weekends (there's that dating conflict again)

So, maybe more than a month is not too bad after all.

I don't know... he does get first pick of the prizes. That being the case, this goes from volunteer status to paid-very-little status. Granted, even the most expensive prize isn't going to be worth much when you look at the time involved, but it is something.

If it were me, I'd have a test script that runs everything for me. I wouldn't be running the simulations by hand; I'd use something like that benchmarking script, only have it loop through each possible robot script once per generated map. I would have it take a parameter for which map to start on and how many maps to run. Then I'd have it run through about 10 maps each night before bed. Given 100 entries, that's 1000 runs. At 60 seconds max per run, that's 1000 minutes max. Given how few benchmarks actually hit that high, it would probably be closer to 500 minutes, which is just over 8 hours.

If 8 hours was too long in one session, I would divite it into two sessions - one before bed and one before I left for work. Either way, it's 10 maps a day, which would mean only 10 days.

Whatever's going on now has taken 30 days, which means to me one of the following: there were a large number of entrants (200+), there was a problem in the initial tests (a bug in testing causing everybody's score to be way off), or matt isn't working on it more often than once in a while. I just hope it's not the latter.

no, zack gets that, and matt is the one who is running the tests..

my mistake. Nevermind.

How long did you have to create the script? Umm, let me think here...1 month?

Anyway, yes, it is running much longer than normal. I do apologize and I thank those of you that are being patient with me.

I have been having a heck of a time with my real job and other life commitments. That piled on top of the fact that the computer I normally use for judging is not able to be used. I do have a judging computer secured now and the judging should be done in short order.

Again, I apologize.

Also, I am doing something I should have done long ago. I am posting all the script on the ftp as we speak. They will be there very shortly.

Perhaps a new contest could be started while we wait for the results? I don't really care if I win or not. I just love the challenge and want to get going on another.

Additionally, in case anyone cares, I've moved my scripts to a new directory on my server in the hopes that I am able to do more PHP contests. http://rumkin.com/reference/php_contest/ -- now I should go back and edit my posts to point to the permanent location. :-)

Use mod_rewrite.

That will work, but then with how much I move things around, I will get a huge list of redirects... and then I encourage people to link to the wrong URL or an outdated URL, and people think that their links still work and ...

Anyway, I understand that it is a personal choice, and I don't see the need of mod_rewrite when I can fix all but 1 URL in this forum....

Maybe if I had a more professional site, I would worry about this stuff a bit more.

snzkzz-z-z-z-z-z yawwwn.... are we there yet?

Contest Interval Graph and the source