It is our pleasure to introduce Travelling with style, a contest which seeks to arm you, the contestants, with knowledge and familiarity with nice and friendly tools whilst offering the promise of juicy prizes for the best of the best.
The API of choice is C++ AMP as implemented in Microsoft Visual Studio 2012. It's so lovable that we just had to reach out to the fine gentlemen at Microsoft, who graciously accepted to be part of the adventure - thanks guys!
Of course, this solves one third of the equation...we do need some hardware to flip bits in accordance to your AMPed up commands. Luckily AMD jumped into the position of hardware partner for the contest.
Given that you are deviously clever developers, we could not harvest any of the low hanging fruits (begone, dense algebra!). We wanted a somewhat equivocal task, that forced thought to be invested in the design and potentially allowed for the optimal solution to be a heterogeneous one, as opposed to a purely CPU or GPU one. Which brought us, to the somewhat famous, somewhat old, definitely challenging Travelling Salesman Problem.
The contest will be open between the 12th of June 2012 and the 31st of September 2012. No submissions shall be accepted after the 31st of September, and winners will be announced in the 2nd week of October. Submissions are now closed and we are in the final stages of evaluation. Please consult the intermediate ranking provided below. For all contest related discussion please use the dedicated forum thread. We wish you good luck, and may your paths be short!
Please go through the following documents in order to gain familiarity with rules, requirements, and all other such things, and after that peek at the sample:
After secular battles that lasted far longer than we would have liked, we are finally in a position to announce the final ranking. As a consequence of a most pitched battle, filled with twists and turns, monsieur Bernd Paradies has emerged as the winner, with senor Veikko Eeva coming in on a very very close second place. We congratulate both of our finalists for the skill and chivalry they have shown. Please see the documents below for more details about what has transpired:
As was initially stated, we are also releasing the finalists' submissions, under the MIT v2 license:
We are also publishing one of the submissions that did not make it to the last battle, but which is quite interesting in and of itself:
Beyond3D is most grateful to all involved with the contest, from our friends at Microsoft and AMD to all of the contestants who invested quite a bit of time into tackling the challenge we proposed. This page will remain live as the place to come for seeing the code samples and the contest's history, alongside the dedicated forum thread.
