An Algorithmic Challenge
Written by Alex Armstrong   
Tuesday, 13 January 2015

Churchill Navigation is challenging developers to beat its own solution to an interesting problem. There's a first prize of $5K plus two runner-up awards of $2000 and $500.

5kchallenge 

To quote from the challenge web page:

In a nutshell: We give you a bunch of ranked 2D points, then ask you to find the most important ones inside some randomly generated rectangles. Easy, right?

 

To take part in the contest you need to download a zip file that contains the precise problem definition, a testing framework that can load one of more dlls to evaluate their performance and compare their results and a reference solution used to test for correctness.

The important criteria here is speed - the DLL that provides the correct answer and fastest will be the winner.

The deadline for the contest is 5pm MST on February 10, 2015 and the leaderboard reveals that currently one team has a faster solution than the in-house team.

 

5kcompchurchill

 

Churchill Navigation is a pioneer of Augmented Reality Mapping and has a Mission Management Mapping System that is used by law enforcement agencies. The challenge it has set isn't intended to be directly product related. According to Andras Balogh, who posted news of the competition to Reddit, the problem was originally used for interviewing purposes the idea of turning it into an open-to-all contest was as:

 a fun way to get engaged with the programmer community, and meet some smart engineers


Judging from some of the comments on Reddit, and from the water-cooler discussion of in the I Programmer office the problem is one that devs do find interesting, with several alternative approaches being suggested. Most involve presorting the data in some way either via a direct sort or using a data structure like a quadtree (see Quadtrees and Octrees). One or two people mentioned geographic hashing and a few hybrid schemes have been suggested.  

 

5kcomp

 

As Andras says:

it's fun to see all the different ways people solve the same problem!

He also undertakes to share the in-house team's solution and  along with those of the winning team(s) and says that runtimes will be published once the contest is over.

More Information

Churchill Navigation Programming Challenge

Discussion on Reddit

Related Articles

Algorithm Challenge To Aid Environmental Protection

Quadtrees and Octrees       

 

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, install the I Programmer Toolbar, subscribe to the RSS feed, follow us on, Twitter, FacebookGoogle+ or Linkedin,  or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

 

Banner


Couchbase Adds Vector Search
07/03/2024

Couchbase is adding support for vector search across its entire product line including Capella, Enterprise Server, and Mobile. Support has also been added for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) tech [ ... ]



Pi Day - The Great Unanswered Questions
14/03/2024

It's Pi day again, again, again... Even after so many, I still have things to say about this most intriguing number. The most important things about Pi is that it is irrational and one of the few tran [ ... ]


More News

 

raspberry pi books

 

Comments




or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info

 

Last Updated ( Tuesday, 13 January 2015 )