COIN-OR Open-Source Coding Contest
Contest Impetus:
At the 2000 International Symposium for Mathematical Programming (ISMP),
IBM Research launched the COIN-OR Initiative as an experiment to promote open-source
software for the operations research community. While the long term goal of COIN-OR
was (and remains) to change the world
by building a resource for OR software that is analogous to what the open
literature is for theory, the short term goal was to realize the community participation
needed to grow and become self-sustaining. In November 2002, a significant milestone
was reached when the INFORMS board unanimously voted to host the COIN-OR repository.
To celebrate, we're throwing a contest!
Contest Description:
Beat the COIN-OR
"Simple Branch and Bound" (SBB) code on the
Miplib3 datasets
(and any other mip data sets we might throw at you).
Submissions can be as easy as using SBB and adding your own
Prizes:
Student Prizes:
Three IBM R32 ThinkPads
Model 2658N3U, Mobile Intel Pentium 4 processor-M 2.0GHz-M supports
Enhanced Intel SpeedStep technology, 14.1" XGA TFT display,
256MB DDR SDRAM, 30GB HDD, Ultrabay Plus DVD-ROM,
16MB ATI Mobility Radeon 7000 graphics,
Wi-Fi wireless upgradeable10,
Microsoft Windows XP Professional,
1 year system/battery limited warranty
Non-student prizes:
Non-students are welcome to participate
however, we've yet to come up with a suitable prize for the "Professional"
competition category: stay tuned. (Suggestions and donations welcome.)
Judging:
- The prizes will be awarded based on the qualities desired in
code published on COIN-OR: performance, documentation, extensibility, and maintainability.
- In the extremely unlikely event a tie occurs, it will broken in favor of the earlier submission.
- In keeping with the open source spirit, all active participants in COIN-OR
are invited to subscribe to the coin-contest mailing list and post feedback on the submissions.
- Groups wishing to award other prizes in conjunction with the contest are welcome.
Contest Rules:
- While the norm is expected to be entries by individuals, submissions can be made by teams
but only one prize will be awarded per submission.
- One submission per person, please.
The spirit of the contest is to promote open source developement, therefore...
- All submissions should be available under a CPL-compatible, OSI-certified open source license.
(The easiest way is to simply use the
Common Public License,
CPL).
Note that this rule excludes the use of "free for academic use only" code and
commercial software.
- To make more equitable performance comparisons, code submissions will be compiled
using gcc 3.2.1 (or newer) and run on a single-processor, IBM NetVista (Pentium 4)
machine running a Linux platform.
- The use of cutting planes should adhere to the design
of the Cut Generation Library. Contestants
may expand the design, but redesigns should be consistent with the broader CGL purpose in COIN-OR.
- Communication of algorithms with an underlying exact or approximate solvers (e.g., simplex solvers)
should be made via an standard interface such as the Open Solver Interface (OSI). Again,
contestants are encouraged to expand on the existing OSI design, with the same caveat as above.
- While we applaude clever computational ideas,
total hacks (e.g., hard coding the names of the miplib3 datasets
along with the known ip solutions, optimal objective values, and best
relaxations values) are not in keeping with the
spirit of the competition and will be frowned on (...besides, I thought of it first, anyway :-)
- An open discussion of the contest and rules will be held on the
coin-contest mailing list.
Questions, comments, and suggestions are welcome. Discussion of the rules will close
on March 31, 2003. No modificiations to the rules will be
made
after April 1, 2003.
- Versions of CGL, SBB, and OSI will be frozen for the purposes of the contest from
March 31, 2003 until the submission deadline.
Submission Deadline:
Entries should be submitted via the
coin-contest mailing list by June 30, 2003.
Prize Ceremony:
Prizes will be awarded at the ISMP 2003
meeting to be held on the campus
of the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen, August 18-22.
(We need to arrange something; details tba.)
Coin-Contest Mailing list:
Subscribe
to the coin-contest mailing list.