2008-07-05: Programming contest cooperation, competioin

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Jon Udell: Interviews with Innovators

Ned Gulley is a software designer at The Mathworks and the architect of the company's semi-annual MATLAB programming contest. Since 1999 he's watched contestants exhibit a unique blend of competition and cooperation. Winning solutions are woven from the contributions of ten or more players, and go beyond what any individual could normally have accomplished working alone.

To design a game that harnesses collective intellect in this way, Ned Gulley says, you have to frame a problem that appeals to would-be players just as a flower appeals to bees. This notion of "flower design" can guide us, he thinks, as we begin to explore more general uses of online games in educational and work settings.

There is a jossling between the contestanst to get the highest score, but they appriciate that they are working on collaboration.

If you can pose a good problem, there are a lots of honeybees that you can attract and help you solva the problem. The trick is to come up with a good problem. I fyou can pose the problem well, (flower design).

An interestng skillset in the coming years is the proble framing side. The flower design side.

See different approaches..it is particularly humbling about having an idea that you think of being so clever, and watching somone else, within 10 minutes give it a twist... why dint I think of that?

People get energized Zone, Flow ... introducing new ideas versus the tweeking.

Matching the people, they will draw each other. If there is a person that runs away.. not good.

In the internet people can find each other .. on par for collaboration... optimally engaged.

Let people move horizontally in the 'garden space', so people can fing the best place to contribute.

Problem definers. Goal is to enable garden/flower designers. Market place for proble framers. A place where flower dsigniers will be competeing for the 'bees'. Thats what happeing in nature, the co-evolution of flowers and bees.

Key enabler is an easy gigital representation of the proble and the results. Mechanical Turk farning out problems.

Wiki-like interweawing of ideas. Final winning entries, 10 co-authors.

Real programming, learning from each other. Laser focus on specific ideas.

An influential contribution was a person taking the winning code, not changing but commented it .. returning the the comments to the commons. Got lots of social capital from the newsgroup discussions.

Selfish gene -- selfish code. Some code is shared reused. Cloned. Entries mutate over time, like genes, .. a mental construct for the code evolution. The code of the code is to get propagated.

Tag of war between the coder that wants to keep it for himself, and the code that wants to be free.

If your peer in the class -- then its playfullness, not competitive. Their most useful experiences were in a playful shpere.

Addicitve collaboration .. when people collaborate and it has social value. JonUdell: We have a lot to learn about how to harness that wind of collaboration..