And the winner is:
After scoring the SIGGRAPH papers and sketches authors' values, we have found Matt has blown away the competition. His lab is worth 271 points; second and third place winners are Peter Shirley with 212.14 points and Michael Callahan with 198.57 points. There were 74 competing labs, and the average number of points for a team was 86.3687258687259.
Matt's killer lab was:
| Cost | Value | Name |
| 25 | 30.00 | Matt Pharr |
| 20 | 15.00 | Mark Peercy |
| 30 | 15.00 | Maneesh Agrawala |
| 60 | 30.00 | Eric Veach |
| 15 | 0.00 | Gavin S.P. Miller |
| 15 | 30.00 | Reid Gershbein |
| 40 | 0.00 | Henrik Wann Jensen |
| 20 | 15.00 | John Airey |
| 15 | 60.00 | Leif Kobbelt |
| 60 | 0.00 | Leonidas J. Guibas |
| 30 | 32.00 | Leonard McMillan |
| 30 | 44.00 | Steven J. Gortler |
His team cost only 360 Quatloos, with enough left over to buy an espresso machine (worth at least one extra grad student in productivity gained). Fully half of his lab were from Stanford, which is appropriate since Stanford dominated SIGGRAPH this year, crushing the competition like they were small crushable things, scoring in 8 different papers. Sweet sassy molassy!
We asked Matt some questions:
Q: So how did you put together the winning lab? It looks like you scouted
out the Stanford submissions, how about the rest of the team? Are you like
Kevin Bacon, some nexus of the grapevine? Or just an ordinary Joe who got
lucky?
A: First and foremost, I'm thrilled that it wasn't necessary to go the route
of bribing the papers committee in order to take away this victory.
Certainly I made the most out of what I knew about what was coming out of
Stanford, but I'd like to think that it all really boils down to me being
so plugged into the pulse of graphics research today that my victory was
practically inevitable. Though frankly, I wish that Don Greenberg and Andy
van Dam would stop pestering me about getting together for a golf outing so
I can fill them in on my vast and deep understanding of the landscape of
computer graphics today.
Q: Do your relatives know yet about your accomplishment? How has this
newfound fame otherwise changed your life?
A: Er, no. I guess I haven't mentioned it to them. Presumably they'll be
reading about it in the major news weeklies soon enough?
So far, the only change has been that everyone wants to know why they
weren't on my team. How do you explain to your advisor, say, why he wasn't
in your winning team, since he was too expensive to draft for the potential
payoff? How does one do this while simultaneously trying to get a thesis
outline agreed upon?
Q: What prize should you get for having the winning lab? Are you angry that
you're not going to get it?
A: There really is no prize that could compare to pure joy of the victory.
That said, nothing can compare to the ribbing I can now give to Pete
Shirley and the 72 other unnamed competitors who I crushed into the ground
like tiny little insects. Wait. Don't publish that. Say that I said,
"worthy competitors who gallantly gave their best" rather than that last
part.
Right, then. So shower me with cheap ribbons and surplus drink tickets for
the papers and panels reception if you will, but it's all so fleeting in
comparison to being the winner of the first annual(?) fantasy graphics
league.
Q: (hard hitting question, the reporter gets tough:) Do you have any regrets
that you didn't give your lab a name? Please, your tears are wasted on this
grizzled veteran.
A: It's a great regret, actually. Sadly, the muse of cleverness left me when
the pick a name thing came up. Apparently I used the last of my creative
brilliance in picking the team members (bahahaahaha).
Q: Any final comments for your fans?
A: I'd like to thank you and your fellow schemers for putting this contest
together and for all of the work that that no doubt entailed. I'd also
like to thank everyone on my team, especially the ones who came through for
Siggraph 2000. I'd really like to thank Leif "15 point cost, 60 point
payoff" Kobbelt for coming through with his cool solo subdivision paper.
There you have it, and all we can say about winning is that it couldn't have happened to a taller guy.
The conference papers made up the bulk of the points for each team, with the sketches having only a tiny effect on them. In fact, only four authors who could be purchased were involved in a sketch this year (Yoshinori Dobashi, Dani Lischinski, Mel Slater, and Yizhou Yu). 83.9362934362934 of the 86.3687258687259 points an average team scored came from papers, 2.4324324324325 points from sketches. The main effect of points from sketches at the top of the team rankings was to help Peter Shirley move from third to second place and David McAllister from sixth to fourth.
Late breaking controversy: the sketches on the SIGGRAPH site give only the first author's name in most (but not all) cases, making it impossible for FGL's staff of trained professionals to properly adjudicate the results. So, for simplicity, we will award 20 points to the first author of a sketch, nada to the (mysterious) rest of them. We reserve the right to recompute the results if SIGGRAPH changes these pages. Odds are it won't change a thing - with Matt far ahead, Pete surely will find it hard to catch him (wooo, I slay me with these puns).
The top ten teams were:
271.00 - Matt Pharr 212.14 - Peter Shirley, Sleep deprived maniacs 198.57 - Michael Callahan, Big M's House of Explicit Surfaces 180.00 - David K. McAllister, Siggraph crunchin' in my easy chair 179.57 - Peter-Pike Sloan, Graphics 'R Us 165.71 - Doug Zongker, bleah.com, inc. 165.00 - Tomas Möller 163.00 - Wolfgang Heidrich, VIsualization And GRAphics 152.00 - Sebastien Paquet, Bitum 150.57 - Gary Yngve, GVU 149.00 - Hanspeter Pfister, Why Two Kegs? 148.57 - G. W., GSTB 147.57 - David Johnson 142.00 - Davis King, GVU squared 139.00 - YON - Jan C. Hardenbergh, Ray BendersThe observant reader will note that there are fifteen top ten teams. This is because a few authors' names did not properly get matched between datasets when the results were first tabulated, e.g. it wasn't noted that "B. Mirtich" and "Brian Mirtich" were the same person. Brian was a particularly significant pick, chosen by 6 teams, at a cost of only 5 Quatloos and yielding 60 points. So, taking a page from college football, in which the Big Ten is actually made of 11 teams, we list the original top ten interspersed with the five newcomers.
Teams were of all different sorts: alumni teams (witness GVU's success), name teams (all Marks, all Erics [plus a John Hughes for pinch hitting]), theme teams (all ex-ray tracing researchers), location teams (Brussels), and power hitters (teams of just Salesin/Debevec and Hoppe/Debevec). That said, it appears that most teams were created to be serious contenders. There was a tie for the most popular author to be chosen for a team: Peter Shirley and Wolfgang Heidrich were each chosen by 14 teams.
With the inclusion of Brian "Mr. Efficiency" Mirtich, the best team that can be formed is now worth 538 points and costs 390 quatloos (it's somewhat surprising that 10 quatloos are unspent):
### value cost val/cst Name ============================================ 30 60.00 5 12.0000 Brian Mirtich 352 60.00 10 6.0000 Peter Lindstrom 265 60.00 15 4.0000 Leif Kobbelt 340 30.00 10 3.0000 Oliver Deussen 306 20.00 10 2.0000 Mel Slater 366 30.00 15 2.0000 Reid Gershbein 467 32.00 20 1.6000 Yoshinori Dobashi 407 44.00 30 1.4667 Steven J. Gortler 301 30.00 25 1.2000 Matt Pharr 266 32.00 30 1.0667 Leonard McMillan 4 60.00 60 1.0000 Aaron Hertzmann 345 80.00 160 0.5000 Pat Hanrahanand Matt Pharr is now in trouble, since his advisor is on this team.
That's about it, and thanks for participating. What follows are a bunch of tables of data, both the raw input data and the results sorted by various factors.
Input data files: the 5 year SIGGRAPH author listing file, the SIGGRAPH 2000 paper listing, and the SIGGRAPH 2000 sketch listing.
Author values: listed alphabetically, by highest point value earned (Salesin, Hanrahan, and Levoy were the three authors to score more than 60 points), and by efficiency (i.e. the author's point value is divided by quatloo cost). The best possible team is mostly made of the most efficient authors (who are now inefficient for next year, since they will now cost more quatloos), though there are a few pricier authors in the mix.
By the way, if you actually want to read the SIGGRAPH 2000 papers and not just rate the authors, visit Tim Rowley's site.