Fri 6 Apr 2007
In November of 2006 I wrote about a programming contest hosted by Josh Coates and his merry band over at Mozy. Josh is up to his old antics again, and a week from Saturday (April 14), he’s holding a 2nd Code “Deathmatch.”*
The geek action starts at 10AM. Last time they split the $10k among a handful of finishers. This go-round they’ve upped the ante to $20k, which will be dispersed according to this formula: f(x) = (20000/2^x)*1.0039231 (Which is Josh’s curious way of feigning the arcane by including an almost-one multiplier on an otherwise straightforward division.) I’ll break it down for you:
- 1st $10,039.23
- 2nd $5,019.62
- 3rd $2,509.81
- 4th $1,254.90
- 5th $627.45
- 6th $313.73
- 7th $156.86
- 8th $78.43
Get more details and register.
* No actual death is involved
The multiplier isn’t so arbitrary.
give us a hint, then. what does 1.0039231 mean!?!?
no arcane feigning over here – we’re just trying to give away exactly $20K and we’re going to have exactly 8 finalists…
Hi Josh. The mystery is finally solved! Though with the given multiplier 1.0039231 you’ll give away three cents extra (20000.03051.) Drop off the last two digits (1.00392) and you’ll save yourself 2 pennies: 20000.008594
Ryan – you would be correct if we could write checks that included fractions of a cent.
Slight clarification – we’re mean so we round DOWN to the penny. We left the floor symbol out cause it made the formula look kind of ugly.
That’s how we get it to exactly $20k.
Ah yes, with floor it makes sense. I was, as you guessed, rounding up.
[...] You’ll also remember that Josh’s Mozy held the popular $20,000 dollar computer programming “death matches.” [...]