北大・日立新概念コンピューティングコンテスト2018

• Participant registration opens/has opened on January 22, 2019.
• The company entrusted with the distribution of prizes (awarded money and special gifts) was announced on February 7th 2019.
• This year's sticker and T-Shirt design has been announced.
• A specification about the use of the random seed during the final score evluation has been announced in problem A.
• The ranks obtained after the final system test have been announced on March 6th 2019.

Hokkaido University has entrusted Hitachi Document Solutions [Japanese: 株式会社 日立ドキュメントソリューションズ] with the distribution of award money and special gifts for the best ranked contestants. The same company will contact high ranked contestants on behalf of the organizers in order to invite them to attend the award ceremony or else give guidance on the award ceremony. Note that Hitachi Solutions has a 'privacy mark', ensuring high quality standards on handling of personal information.

• The organizers of this contest are a group of researchers at Hitachi Ltd. and Hokkaido University, who collaborate at Hitachi Hokkaido Laboratory for developing new computing concepts, which go beyond the conventional von Neumann architecture. At the moment we focus on the development of the CMOS Annealing Machine to boost non-convex optimization.
• Targeting the preprocessing algorithms for CMOS Annealing we organized our first two marathon-type programming contests in 2017 revolving around the topic of graph transformations. (See first and second contest). The award winning algorithms of last years contests are now successfully in use at Hitachi Ltd. and Hokkaido University. One of these algorithms -- Probabalistic Swaft Shift Annealing (PSSA) -- was even presented at the international conference TPNC2018 and published in the accompanying proceedings with Springer's Lecture notes in computer science.
• This year's programing contest will again be of marathon-type, extending over a period of two weeks. Its topic will focus on the expression of certain optimization problems in the format required by typical annealing hardware.
• This contest will be held in both Japanese and English.

• Anyone is eligible to participate in the contest, regardless of age, gender, nationality, or affiliation. The contest is open for registration any time until the contest closes. For registration of participation, click here.
• The contests will be held for a two-week period from February 14 to February 27, 2019.
• We will prepare three different subproblems A, B and C.
• During the contest period participants may submit as many answers as they like. However, within one hour after submitting a solution, e.g., to subproblem A, the server may reject further submissions to the same subproblem, in order to avoid overload. So please wait for at least one hour before you submit improved solutions.
• Sharing ideas through Twitter or blogs during the contests period is explicitly allowed. You can also solve problems based on ideas which others have posted.*

  * Note that voluntarily shared ideas are public. Hence, if a third party creates the award winning algorithm based on previously shared ideas, the score will be attributed to the algorithm of the third party.

• The submission for each problem will be ranked separately, according to a specified score.
• The overall rank will be determined by multiplying the participants rank in problem A, B and C and ordering the resulting number starting from the minimum.
• Should multiplying a participants rank from problems A, B, and C result in the same overall rank, the participant with the earlier submission date will be ranked better. A participants submission date is defined by the last top-scoring submission to problems A, B, or C.
• A script for accessing the overall score of each contestant is provided under the following url .
• We will prepare sample code for generating input problems and score evaluation for use at the participants personal PC in C++.

• The top-scoring contestants will be awarded the following prizes.
• Total Score (Based on combination from ranks of problem A, B and C)
  • 1^st rank 300,000 yen
  • 2^nd rank 50,000 yen
  • 3^rd rank 30,000 yen
  • 4^th～20^th Special Gifts (Hokkaido University and Hitachi Ltd.’s goods)

• Problem A
  • 1^st rank 30,000 yen
  • 2^nd～10^th Special Gifts (Hokkaido University and Hitachi Ltd.’s goods)

• Problem B
  • 1^st rank 30,000 yen
  • 2^nd～10^th Special Gifts (Hokkaido University and Hitachi Ltd.’s goods)

• Problem C
  • 1^st rank 30,000 yen
  • 2^nd～10^th Special Gifts (Hokkaido University and Hitachi Ltd.’s goods)

• In addition, we award all prize winners with an original T-shirt and a sticker. After the contest, all prize winners will be contacted by Hokkaido University and Hitachi Ltd. through a third party via Email. Please reply to this e-mail within the specified time limit, if you agree to receiving the prize. Please note that we will have to cancel the prize, in case we do not receive a reply by the designated date.

The final ranking of contestants after conducting the full system test is announced in the table below. We thank every contestant for their contribution to as well as their participation in the contest. If possible, please come and attend the ceremony on Friday March 15th (as announced further below).

The rank of contestants with respect to sub problems A, B, and C is listed below.

• The contest's awards ceremony will be held during the lunch seminar session of the 81st National Convention of the Information Processing Society of Japan.
• Date and time: March 2019 (Friday) 11:40-12:30
• Place: Fukuoka University Nanakuma Campus A Building A203, Auditorium #4
• Content: After explanation of the contest’s background and the proposed problems, the award winners of problems A, B, and C as well as the overall winner are invited to give short lectures, explaining the main ideas of their algorithms (*,**).

  *Note that travel expenses can only be supported for speakers residing in Japan. **We are planning to have a meeting to exchange ideas with the winners and the participants from Hokkaido University and Hitachi after the award ceremony at a conference room near Fukuoka University. Participants in question will be contacted by e-mail.

• The programming languages used should be compatible with AtCoder Regular Contest.
• Please read AtCoder Inc.’s terms of service, tutorials, rules, glossaries, and frequently asked questions.

• Last year we held two marathon-type programming contests, each of which lasting two weeks. The contests content focused on problems of graph embedding, which are relevant to the construction of Annealing Machines.
• Altogether, both contests had more than 1000 participants, whose age ranged from high-school students up to grown ups. More than 300 people submitted successfully working solutions and scores kept ever changing, resulting in a narrow race among the participants.
• The award ceremony was held at the 80th National Convention of the Information Processing Society of Japan. Both award winners gave lectures on the ideas entering their award winning algorithm.

• While conventional computers follow well-defined procedures with the target to produce a unique and well defined result, New-Concept Computing tries to identify relevant factors in social systems and simulate them by mapping the relevant process onto a physical process.
• The flow of mapping of a social system to a physical system and ultimately onto annealing hardware is illustrated in the figure below:
  1. The social system is expressed in terms of a physical energy-function whose components can be described by a graph, see Fig.(1)→(2).
  2. A graph conversion algorithm is run. This algorithm converts a complex, irregular graph structure into a simple and regular structure that can be implemented into hardware, see Fig.(2)→(3).
  3. The hardware, see Fig. (4) simulates the cooling process of a physical system. Its resulting state and energy, give the solution to the original social problem in Fig.(1).

• In order to make use of efficient hardware, it is pertinent to develop efficient formulations of social problems as well as efficient algorithms for their conversion into hardware compatible formats. Hokkaido University and Hitachi Ltd. are tackling such challenges together through open innovation.

FYI: Here is a (Japanese) pamphlet introducing our team and our research.