Write code, fix the space station, win $10,000
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Write code, fix the space station, win $10,000
1–10 of 65 posts
Re: Write code, fix the space station, win $10,000
#2i found almost offensive that they offer just 10k for such a task
Re: Write code, fix the space station, win $10,000
#3If this is legit, then this is incredibly cool. Having your code run in space is as close as many of us will come to being in space ourselves.
Sure, 10K is small given that it's the ISS, but let's be honest, the money is the secondary prize. This is for bragging rights.
Re: Write code, fix the space station, win $10,000
#4If this is legit, then this is incredibly cool. Having your code run in space is as close as many of us will come to being in space ourselves. Sure, 10K is small given that it's the ISS, but let's be honest, the money is the secondary prize. This is for bragging rights.
I think you would just be providing a table of data for the positioning of the solar cells during an orbit.
Re: Write code, fix the space station, win $10,000
#5i found almost offensive that they offer just 10k for such a task
If they can get solutions at that price, why pay more? Besides, having that on your resume pretty much guarantees future consulting $.
Re: Write code, fix the space station, win $10,000
#6So many trash comments on the site about how NASA should be "offering more money" or how this is a way for them to "save money" and it is all a scam.
Seriously? Any decent hacker attempting this is probably doing it for props. The money is great and provides a good monetary incentive but when it comes down to it I'd wager people would do this for free. Hell a personal tour of NASA and maybe their name in the code might but just as good.
Re: Write code, fix the space station, win $10,000
#7i found almost offensive that they offer just 10k for such a task
This contest is not meant for Ferengi such as yourself, but the noble hackers of the Federation. And Vulcans.
Re: Write code, fix the space station, win $10,000
#8i found almost offensive that they offer just 10k for such a task
A lot of people would jump on this kind of thing for free. Don't like the money? Don't enter the contest.
Re: Write code, fix the space station, win $10,000
#9Optimization problems like that are fascinating. We can treat them generically without having to teach our program about the specific problem it's trying to solve. All we have to do is come up with proposed solutions and pare them down.
For starters, we need a "cost function" so we can see which solutions are better than others. That's the easy part: render the model on 3D hardware, lighting it with a distant point light source. The "cost" (the value we're trying to minimize) is 1 - Σ(face_brightness); modern hardware can easily handle precise geometric shadowing using a stencil buffer or similar well-known technique. Handle the thermal constraints by setting the "cost" to 1 when the space station disintegrates.
Now we just need to find some ways of coming up with proposed solutions and pruning all but the best solutions. This problem has path dependencies, so we can't just apply a greedy algorithm. That is, solar panel actuators take time to move, so the best solution for time [T_1, T_3] isn't necessarily the concatenations of the best individual solutions for intervals [T_1, T_2] and [T2, T_3].
What you're left with is actually a graph search problem, where our graph nodes are actuator inputs at specific (quantized) times; I feel like something like the veneralbe A* algorihm would be a good place to start looking for paths through this graph.
Re: Write code, fix the space station, win $10,000
#10i found almost offensive that they offer just 10k for such a task
It's a fun, hard, puzzle. Some people enjoy fun hard puzzles. This puzzle gives those people a small chance of winning some cash as well as giving them a fun hard puzzle to work on.