[If you want to know about how the contest rules work, then click on any blue text in this sentence.]
The winner of this year's FGL is not a giant bitter melon, but rather:
Aaron Hertzmann (on the right).
The Top Eleven are:
Points Name & Lab ========================================================= 326.67 Aaron Hertzmann, Super Butter Dog 277.57 Tim Purcell, Wunky Munky Du 265.00 Hugues Hoppe, Shlomo & Hugues 255.24 Ian Buck, The Frys Addicts 243.57 Henrik Wann Jensen, The Vikings 230.00 Zeki Melek, incompressible fluid motion (?) 227.00 Mathieu Desbrun, The cheap ones (quatloos-wise) 218.57 Cyrille Damez 217.67 Brian Curless and David Salesin, Pixel Polytech 202.00 Dave Zareski, Particle Tracers 200.00 Peter Shirley, Utah Polygonists
out of 78 contestants. Surprisingly, the sketches had no effect whatsoever on the team rankings this year (more about the individual author rankings will follow). Aaron Hertzmann was the only person to score off of sketches, gaining 20 points for Michael Kazhdan. The winning research lab, Super Butter Dog, was:
Quatloos Value Name ======== ===== ====================== 35 6.67 Lee Markosian 40 62.00 Zoran Popovic 10 15.00 Ying-Qing Xu 20 45.00 Christoph Bregler 60 30.00 Frédo Durand 20 0.00 Andrei Khodakovsky 50 44.00 Brian Curless 10 20.00 Michael Kazhdan 15 20.00 Steve Marschner 50 60.00 Ronald Fedkiw 45 0.00 Wolfgang Heidrich 45 24.00 Leonard McMillan
We caught up with Aaron somewhere within 13,000 miles of the Marianas Trench, where he gave this brief interview.
Q: Congratulations on your victory! How you do plan to celebrate?
A: By moving somewhere REALLY REALLY cold!
Q: In last year's FGL contest you finished second, edging out the previous previous year's first place winner, Matt Pharr. Now you're the top dog, the big cheese, the bigtop cheese-dog. To what do you owe your success?
A: Hard work, teamwork, fair play, cooperation, everyone came to the field to play and gave 110%. In the words of a famous baseball coach: "The team did all the work; I didn't play a single inning."
Actually, last year I realized that the Fantasy Graphics League is far sweeter a cherry than having an actual SIGGRAPH papers, and focused my efforts on scouting for my team (so-called "job interviews"). In the words of a famous soccer coach: "Mais um caipirinha, por favor."
Q: Will you use your new-found powers for good or evil?
A: Powers? What powers?
I was hoping for Austin Powers, but I all got were these Francis Gary Powers. Bleah. What good is that?
Q: Please tell us how this victory has changed your life. Is your life now really like a Coke commercial with singing? Or has your existence simply had subtitles added to it, so that people around the world may understand and gain strength from it?
A: I like to think that we are all winners, each in our own special way. But it's nice to know that, in a more accurate sense, I'm the winner. In a 49-point spread sense. Ahhh.
Q: Do you have any other answers you'd like us to give you questions for?
Yes, Q: Just how funky is Super Butter Dog?
A: I would say moderately so.
Q: Say "silk" five times fast. Now, what do cows drink?
A: How should I know? Ask a biologist. Tang, perhaps?
Q: Do you have any words of discouragement for next year's contestants?
A: Follow your dreams, climb every mountain, smell every rose, swim every fjord, scale every wall, bake every cake, hug every monkey, light every fire, mull every cider, etc.
What is a sport without gratuitous statistics about the players? So, here's a little more analysis of how the rank of the authors themselves was affected by the sketch results. The new efficiency ranking for the authors is:
Authors ranked by efficiency ### Value Cost Efficiency Name ============================================= 220 20.00 5 4.0000 James Davis 142 65.00 20 3.2500 Fabio Pellacini 334 60.00 20 3.0000 Marc Alexa 297 60.00 20 3.0000 Ken Perlin 38 12.00 5 2.4000 Aseem Agarwala 75 45.00 20 2.2500 Christoph Bregler 548 20.00 10 2.0000 Xianfeng Gu 79 20.00 10 2.0000 Cindy M. Grimm 384 20.00 10 2.0000 Michael Kazhdan 92 20.00 10 2.0000 Dani LischinskiNote how sketches moved 5 different authors into the top 10 for efficiency (see the pre-sketch top 10 beyond this blue ink). Also note that, because sketch points do not count towards an author's cost (only authorship for the last five years of SIGGRAPH papers counts), these authors will not go up in cost next year.
The rankings based entirely on points earned this year were not much affected by the sketches. The only effect on the top ranked authors was that James F. O'Brien joined the "60 point club" (there were a lot of these this year):
Authors ranked by highest point value ### Value Cost Efficiency Name ============================================= 142 65.00 20 3.2500 Fabio Pellacini 569 62.00 40 1.5500 Zoran Popovic 334 60.00 20 3.0000 Marc Alexa 449 60.00 50 1.2000 Ronald Fedkiw 195 60.00 100 0.6000 Heung-Yeung Shum 221 60.00 100 0.6000 James F. O'Brien 297 60.00 20 3.0000 Ken Perlin 162 60.00 65 0.9231 George Drettakis 190 50.00 85 0.5882 Henrik Wann Jensen 239 47.00 90 0.5222 Jessica K. Hodgins 75 45.00 20 2.2500 Christoph Bregler 410 45.00 240 0.1875 Pat Hanrahan 53 44.00 50 0.8800 Brian Curless 279 42.00 70 0.6000 Julie Dorsey 40 40.00 70 0.5714 Baining Guo 123 35.00 150 0.2333 Donald P. GreenbergSo, one could conclude that most top point-earning authors do not submit sketches, if the year number is 2002.
While you contemplate all this wisdom, you can also randomly click your mouse on the following: