Fantasy Graphics League Results for 2004

And the winner is...

Here is his winning team:

 1  cost: 15  value: 80.00  John Hart
 2  cost: 40  value: 50.00  Alla Sheffer
 3  cost: 25  value: 12.00  Ian Buck
 4  cost: 15  value:  0.00  Yoshihisa Shinagawa
 5  cost: 35  value: 40.00  Yizhou Yu
 6  cost: 50  value:  0.00  Peter-Pike Sloan
 7  cost: 15  value:  0.00  Ross T. Whitaker
 8  cost: 30  value:  0.00  Simon Premoze
 9  cost: 10  value: 45.00  Steven M. Seitz
10  cost: 50  value: 30.00  Michael Gleicher
11  cost: 90  value: 20.00  Marc Alexa
12  cost: 20  value: 15.00  Kurt Akeley

Amazingly enough, John Hart was also the grossest and cheapest, I mean, the largest grossing and most cost-effective researcher you could hire this year. Easily his best investment was to hire himself.

He was able to pull ahead of last year's winner Antoine McNamara in the end because one of his lab members, Alla Sheffer, scored 20 points for a sketch. Your reward for reading this far: a list of this year's sketches and first authors, information currently not available anywhere else (well, here, eventually).

The final top ten labs were:

Points  Name & Lab
=========================================================
292.00  John Hart, lab name: The GPU Abuse Center
282.50  Antoine McNamara, lab name: The Inverse Kinematics
275.00  Mira Dontcheva
240.00  T. Aila, J. Lehtinen, V. Miettinen, lab name: rand()%680 + 1
232.50  Aaron Hertzmann, lab name: Funky Homunculi
212.00  Jan Kautz, lab name: Pixel-Mob
209.50  Jonathan Cohen, lab name: Sigraphopoly
200.00  Frank Losasso, lab name: The space partitioners
185.00  Pin Ren, lab name: My Lab's name
177.50  Eric Haines, lab name: A Growing Concern

This year five of the top ten were helped by sketches. Compare this to last year's results, where sketches had absolutely no effect on the standings. Me, I'm just happy I actually finished in the top ten - woo hoo, it's my birthday, it's my birthday. The bribes I paid myself were well worth it.

Without further ado, here's the post-game interview with this year's winner.

John Hart: Before we begin, please let me offer my humblest congratulations to Antoine McNamara for his outstanding performance with the FGL by saying "lah-hoo-zah-her."

Humble Scribe: This was a close race. Do you think you won because the American people were concerned about the issues, or because of your natural charisma and common touch?

JH: Like all politicians, I won because I cheated. My fantasy lab consisted of people whose papers I could not review because of a conflict of interest, so I volunteered for every SIGGRAPH paper I was eligible to review, and soundly rejected all of them.

HS: How will you spend all that money?

JH: I'm going to follow the lead of Marc Olano and order 200 lbs of silly putty directly from DuPont, which is enough to build an entire human being.

Some parts of the US question whether genetic algorithms should be taught in school, preferring to teach only of the existence of oracle-based intelligent design methodologies. How does this affect your teaching?

The rods and cones in a monkey retina are arranged in a Poisson-disk pattern so the monkey isn't distracted by aliasing when watching out for lurking tigers. Obviously the monkey should have been watching out for scientists.

When you teach, are you a more Gangsta-style rapper, or have you gone more Rapcore or perhaps Crunk?

I often get the comment on teacher feedback forms: "Look forward to the times when Prof. Hart is traveling and his grad student teaches the class."

Why did you represent New Jersey and not Illinois or Washington State when you signed the Declaration of Independence?

Ah. You got this from the part of my webpage that points to other John Harts. This is because Google uses a "hubs and authorities" metric when sorting its index. I like to think that when you Google John Hart you get my webpage because I'm important, but it's really because my webpage is an authority on the John-Hartness of things.

How would you avoid wardrobe malfunctions in the future?

Avoid them?! I'm very much in favor of them.

You hired yourself for your own team. If you start to underperform because you hate your boss, will you fire yourself, or just give yourself a stern talking-to?

If I were my own boss, I'd offer myself professional advancement in exchange for sexual favors.

In the third quarter, what was it that made you decide to go for it instead of taking the easy field goal?

I was losing to Antoine McNamara before the sketches results came out and saved my butt. I'll have to take that into consideration the next time I argue against the existence and utility of the sketches program.

Is this just a game, or do friendships affect your alliances and who you vote off the island?

It's all a game. SIGGRAPH papers. Tenure. Monkeyball.

Coming into the home stretch, the last innning, the sixth chukker, Antoine McNamara looked like he was going to have a two-peat, grab the brass ring, take the crown, win the Beehive Boot trophy, and go for the gold. To what do you owe your come from behind, dark horse, underdog, never say die, never say lose, never say pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis victory?

As David Cross said at the end of his Celebrity Poker run, "I wanted to give 110%, but felt in the end I was only able to give about 108%."

The yacht you sent me really was not necessary. One quick question: what is the best way to polish the gold-plated fixtures?

It's amazing what you can buy with "startup" money.

Why do you think voters selected you this year as the best supporting actor in a new sitcom?

Huh? I think perhaps you might have me confused with Dick Cheney.

Well, that's that, then. And adebadadebadadebada that's all folks: this will be the last year for the Fantasy Graphics League. It's been fun, but it's also become more and more difficult to run, as servers clamp down on "sendmail" to avoid spam, making it hard to send out results, etc. Of course, come November I might get bored and run it just one last time, again...

Speaking of email, I do hope to send results to all participants sometime soon. If you're dying to know right now who was worth how many points this year, check the author list.

Thanks to everyone who participated and helped out. Special thanks to Andrew Glassner, who hosted some of the Perl scripts used for this year's contest.

Here are all the links you'll ever need:

From the cranial cavities of Eric Haines, Phil Dutré, Dan Kartch, and Ben Trumbore.
last updated: May 28, 2004