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09/25/2005 Entry: "In Praise of Tweaking:"

take a look at the article by By Ned Gulley of The MathWorks, Inc. he states Programming contests have become a regular feature of geek culture. The ACM, for example, runs a collegiate programming competition that has grown to include almost 4000 teams from around the world ... his argument in favor of collboration is quite convinving ... it sgoes something like this .... I know something you want to know. But will I tell you? Why should I? What's in it for me? Internet technology makes the simple act of online collaboration easy, but human nature stubbornly resists change. Why should I collaborate with you? What would convince me to share my ideas with you, given that you might use them to compete with me? In a larger sense, how might we build a system that encourages people to collaborate in, for example, writing useful code? ... read the whole thing and find out what MATHWORKS has done in:

Mapping Mars: Given several robotic rovers and a rough map of part of the surface of Mars, find optimal routing so as to explore the most area in the least time.
Protein folding: A protein is a string of amino acids, each of which is either hydrophobic or hydrophilic. Given such a protein, fold it in two dimensions so as to minimize the distance between hydrophobic amino acids.
Mastermind Solve for the hidden colored pegs in a generalized Mastermind problem that may have any number of pegs and colors.
Molecular Modeling: Given a table of distances between various pairs of atoms in a molecule, reconstruct the molecule's shape.

ITS REALLY NICE TO SEE FOLKS CREATE AND TANGIBLY SUPPORT CHALLENGE FORMULATIONS, PROGRESS AND CREDIT TRACKING ...

[via Crummy: The Site]