KiXtart Golf: Burrows-Wheeler-Transform Results

The tournament started on December 18, 2002 in this thread KiXGolf: Burrows-Wheeler Transform

The tournament package is available at http://people.bu.edu/jenmeyer/kixtart/kixgolf_bwt.zip.

Answer for the special recognition challenge was: Charles Dickens as the quote is from the first paragraphs of "A Christmas Carol".

Winner for the special recognition challenge is : Shawn, who provided the correct answer some 20 hours after the challenge was posted.

First valid KiXGolf Scorer (private coding): maciep with a KiXGolf score of 628 on December 20, about 28 hours into the challenge.

Winner of the first round (private coding): Howard Bullock with a KiXGolf score of 193 on December 29.

Winner of the second round (public coding): MightyR1 with a KiXGolf score of 191 on December 29, about one hour after Howard posted his code. MightyR1 took advantage of an apparent bug in the way ASC() handles a multi-character string.

Special recognition also goes to Howard Bullock who took his CPU beyond the normal usage pattern and had his computer runnign for over 92 hours at 100% CPU usage without damage to his computer [Wink] However, his final winning code is slightly faster [Smile]

A graph outlining the improvements of the various codes will follow on Monday (KiXGolf Score versus BBS Posting Time for all participants).

And now to the third part!

Part three is a test for some potential improvements to the KiXGolf scoring. Not only will you have to minimize your keystrokes, but you will also have to take into consideration memory usage and running time. The Extended KiXGolf Score will be a weighted average of those three indicators.

An update KiXGolf package including the new measurements is available at http://people.bu.edu/jenmeyer/kixtart/kixgolf_bwt.zip.

For easier coding purposes the actual BWTDecode() function has been moved into it's own external UDF file. Additionally the function can be run multiple times inside a loop to measure average performance more precisely. Timing is accurate to the millisecond and memory usage is accurate to the byte.

A text file is created automatically which contains computer information and the extended KiXGolf statistics so they can be easily posted on the KiXtart BBS.

I would like to ask all of you who participated or who are generally interested in KiXGolf to download the updated package and run it on your computers. Please post back the text file containing the enhanced performance information. You can also give the various other posted solutions a try or post your own BWTDecoder even if it didn't win anything.

I am very interested in how the Extended KiXGolf score look like on different computers and with different algorithms.

Ultimately the Extended KiXGolf Score will be calculated by testing all submitted solutions on the same computer to create a level playing field.

Also, please feel free to comment of the implementation of the extended measurements and the usefulness of them.

[ 06. January 2003, 03:57: Message edited by: sealeopard ]
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