Fantasy Graphics League 2005

No one (except the monkeys themselves) knew where they came from. All that was clear was that these were a different sort of flying monkey: they had money. Rather than working for witches and kidnapping little dogs, this time around they were calling the shots. And there were a lot of them, thousands upon thousands, each with more money than most of us make our whole lives. They purchased prescription drugs, fruitcakes, weight loss products, Rolexi, and cosmetics from the Dead Sea. They bought engraveries, they bought tobogganeers, they bought forklifteriums, they bought astrologizettes.

Then they discovered computer graphics. Specifically, screen-savers. Pretty colors, flashing lights, spinny things, all on a portable little screen. Once they discovered the electric sheep screensaver, they purchased majority holdings in EarthLink and Time-Warner just to guarantee enough bandwidth for flying monkeys everywhere. But soon their insatiable desires for more spinning flashing pretty things led them to hire any and all graphics researchers, to work on new screensaver designs.

Now there are only a few people left in the world with the resources to compete with these monkeys. You are one of them. Go now and attempt to hire the best lab possible, to wrest the evolution of computer graphics away from them.

Rules

Short version, for previous players: the rules are the same as before, with a twist. This year, there will be 1000 flying monkey teams. Each monkey randomly chooses a team until all positions are filled or all money is spent. These teams will be the ones you are competing against. Defend the honor of your species and show those monkeys what for! (Note: Perl's random number generator will replace the monkeys if we can't round up 1000 typewriters.)

Computer graphics researchers salaries are computed by how many times they have been published in SIGGRAPH the past five years, based on the economic formula:

    Researcher's value in quatloos = Sum of ( 60 / A )

rounded to the nearest multiple of 5 (or 10, if over 100), where "A" is the number of authors that contributed to a paper. So if a researcher was a part of two papers, being the only author of one of them and one of 4 authors on the other, the value would be:

    value = ( 60 / 1 ) + ( 60 / 4 ) = 75 Quatloos

Here are your constraints:

Your budget is 400 Quatloos.
You can hire up to 12 researchers.
You can hire from all people who have had a paper in SIGGRAPH in the past five years.
You have until midnight PST on January 26, 2005, to create and submit your lab.

Researchers are then judged by the papers and sketches accepted for SIGGRAPH. Each paper scores points for the authors, scoring (60/A) points for each author on the paper. Each sketch scores 20 points for the first author, only. Add up your points and that is your lab's score.

Note: Aaron Hertzmann pointed out to me that there are two different researchers with the name of "Li Zhang", one at the U. of W., one at HP. Sorry about that. At this point it's wicked hard to fix this error, since there are already a bunch of lab entries. So if you hire Li Zhang you get both, and they take up only one office spot.

(DON'T) HIRE YOUR LAB
(Sorry, this year's contest is closed, though I'll leave the scripts running)

Also, you can check out the results of last year's contest.

But Why? Why?!

Well, I was going to stop running this game last year, but the public (well, two people) demanded (asked) that I continue (not stop). So, here you go.

Thanks to gpgpu.org for hosting the Perl scripts that run this contest.

From the somewhat evolved minds of Eric Haines, Phil Dutré, Dan Kartch, and Ben Trumbore.
last updated: January 27, 2005