With the coding challenge still fresh in everyone’s mind. I would like to solicit Ideas on how to make the challenge better.

Ideas for future coding challenges.

Ways to Improve Submission Participation.

Ways to Improve Voting Participation.

Ways to make the challenge more fun.

Thanks in advance for your comments.

Ideas for future coding challenges

Address a deficiency/usability problem in the tool (did I say that?!)
Address a highly rated Wish List request
(are these the same thing?)
Let the people speak? A thread with suggestions that could be culled into a poll (ala Dilbert Weasel Nomination process or Google GMail features)

Ways to Improve Submission Participation

Keep the scope of the problem small enough to allow someone to work on it "during lunch"
Create some sort of teams and a private place for them to collaborate.

Ways to Improve Voting participation

See Ideas above. If the solution to be voted on affects me in some way, I might be more inclined to look at it (and learn from it)

Ways to make the challenge more fun

See all above Example: If I was a UI expert and you were a pattern expert, we could combine our talents, address the challenge "during lunch" and give a gift to OUR community.

I generaly agree with the post above that the task needs to be smaller. Better smaller and more often than large and demanding.

Here are some ideas:
Write an app that runs in the background searching google and other search sites for labview, G, lava etc so that LabVIEW gets an higher rating here
The most efficient implementation of some recursive algorithm in LabVIEW.
The most shorthand (least amount of square meters of VI) implementation of some task (the more cryptic, the better)

I agree.
I worked on this last challenge over a long period of time, with each session being anywhere between a few minutes to around an hour and I had a lot of periods when I couldn't get around to it. As a result, remembering everything I wanted to do wasn't always particularly easy.
A smaller scope, like not building an application to demo the API, would have made it easier (although less interesting).

I also like the idea about seeing how small you can make a certain bit of code.

Idea for future challenge:

I'd like to see something involving the picture control, which I think is under utilized. Perhaps some subVI - algorithm that recognizes when you have "selected" various shaped objects or drawing artifacts in the picture.

Or a really efficient way to create a highlight on the picture around an arbitrary object, either a glow or walking ants.

Another topic I'd like to see is a challenge that uses one of the GOOP implementations in a specific way. Not a whole application, just the best object class and concise method set to implement an item. (maybe a picture control drawing object?).

Idea for a new challenge:

Program solves a jigsaw puzzle. Input is a zip file containing bmp files of each piece in random orientation (or other suitable file format) Output is a image of the solved puzzle, and a table of x,y and rotation location for each of the pieces. Sample puzzles to solve provided, but of course the program has to solve a similar puzzle that the programmer doesn't get to see in advance. Make it tough enough that just matching edge profiles won't work efficiently, the winner will likely have to do some kind of texture, color or pattern matching to sort out the pieces.

Best Regards, Louis

I participated in NI's first coding challenge (BitTwiddling) as an internal at Philips Research. It was fun, I learned a lot and we won it

I still find it the nicest coding challenge so far because it was so simple. You could think about it and get new ideas and you just couldn't stop working on it... Our team really liked it, I guess the boss liked it less

Small, simple... yet quite a challenge to do it in the fastest way.

Or, a coding challenge with as target the least LabVIEW nodes (or code bytes) instead of the quickest one ?

Joris

You might also consider a different prize for the winner. I'm sure that a NI-6008 works for some people. But I'd hazard a guess that a $150 Amazon gift card would go over with more people...

BTW, I didn't participate in this coding challenge, mostly because of time constraints. So a quick coding challenge would be nice. But a quick coding challenge could also mean that the prize was less costly. I too would like to see a challenge with the picture control. In fact, when I read the previous post from Mike Ashe, I thought of this post, which was done to prove that with enough time and effort or experience (in this case), any UI can be done in the picture control.

This post has been edited by chrisdavis: Oct 22 2006, 01:15 AM

How about a $100 eBay card and a free Premium Membership?

I'm not a big fan of eBay, but others are. But you've got the idea. Cash is a universal language...

Like 10 000 columbian pesos!!!

You can already give the community many gifts here. Show us what you've got.

As far as coding challenges, I'm up for the more challenging ones that push the envelope and the limits of LabVIEW. Bit twidling and the like is pretty boring, if you ask me. You should also throw in a little VI scripting while you're at it. For example, why not have a challenge that asks you to come up with a text representation of a VI? Then you create a tool to read-in that file and generate the VI for you. Now that's a challenge! This is LAVA after all...

This is along the lines of what I was thinking about. Of course, do we want to turn LabVIEW into a text-based language? And Michael's idea would have to somehow get around these issues (yes, blatant plug for posts of mine that no one's responded to yet ). I was also thinking something that ventured into somehow decoding the VI file format would be cool (Word and Excel support in OpenOffice.org got me thinking), but I really have no idea whether this is at all possible/practical.

Jaegen

No, but there are several reasons for wanting to have this ability. A current one that I am running into is declassification and reuse of LabVIEW code that was developed on a DoD classified computer system. Now for text based languages you can print out the code or look at it with a text editor and verify that there are no classified numbers or information, but currently with LabVIEW this is impossible. There are a few software tools that exist that can automate this process for text based code, but non (that I am aware of) that can do this for LabVIEW.

If we could convert VIs to XML, we could run the XML through one of these tools and then convert back to LabVIEw, or at least allow the code to be released.

IMO this is a typical example of something that requires a lot of work and a lot of time, still - all you coul