If baseball, football, basketball, and even the Tour de France can do it, so can computer graphics. While you're staying up late trying to make your SIGGRAPH submission's LaTeX compile, for the love of Adam, compile, you hellspawn document, we provide here a simple diversion. If you tire of the day to day sports news, you can instead attempt to track the movements and doings of past SIGGRAPH authors (stalking is prohibited). Fame, fortune, and neither of these await you!
The concept is simple. You have 400 Quatloos. Instead of wagering it on the newcomer, you are to hire up to twelve computer graphics researchers to produce papers for SIGGRAPH 00 (000?). You have around 473 (well, exactly 473) previous SIGGRAPH authors to choose from; in fact, all SIGGRAPH technical paper authors from 1995 through 1999. Each author has a cost rating, based on a simple, idiotic formula. To wit, each paper an author was involved in during this time period increases his or her cost rating by:
60 / (number of authors who wrote the paper)60 is chosen for its connection to Babylonian mathematics, a field which has no connection with SIGGRAPH but may someday be visualized with computer graphics in a way that maximizes funding for the researchers doing the work.
An author's rating is the sum of his or her contributions. This formula was chosen because it's simple to code and to understand, and because it cannot be considered a fair rating of anyone's real worth. This is a game, not a tenure track rating system. Hey, if it's any solace, my rating's zero; I struggle on, a hollow shell of a human being, but somehow still survive.
The object: score the most points, based on both papers and sketches accepted for SIGGRAPH 00. The scoring system is:
60 / (number of paper authors)added together for each paper or sketch that your chosen author is involved in. For example, you hire J. Worthington Kudzu for your team. He is one of four authors on the groundbreaking paper, "On Cross-Vertex Meta-Wavelet Hierarchy Determination", so would score 60/4=15 points for it. He also had a technical sketch called "Modeling Desperation and Angst"; as the single author, he scores 20/1=20 points for this contribution. His total score for your team is 35 points. Whichever submitted team has the most points, wins. The tie-breaker is who spent the least in Quatloos for their team; the second tie-breaker is the smaller number of researchers on a team; after that, we flip coins or toss pigs or somesuch. What do you win? Beats us. But we'll come up with something.
20 / (number of sketch authors)
The deadline is 12 January 2000, 5 pm Pacific Time, just like SIGGRAPH 2000. To research members for your lab, you might check SIGGRAPH's Bibliography Database Search. Here you can search on authors, and at the middle of this page there are links to lists of what papers were published in SIGGRAPH and elsewhere. Or you can forget research and just pick a team made of people named "John".
Some may complain that other conferences are ignored, journals are ignored, impact papers are not given more points, short papers are weighted the same as long ones, and that the number of footnotes or corporate sponsors are not factored in. Others may complain that new people, i.e. rookies, are not included (if you deeply care, you get to write the Perl CGI script next year for this thing...). Still others may worry about the effect on the SIGGRAPH review process ("Your paper is accepted, on the condition that the second author is removed and replaced by the following three people"). Some people are deeply concerned about improperly removing mattress tags and keeping their scissors oiled, too. On the real concerns front: no, we won't release any information about you to anyone or spam you. If you are a winner, we will certainly want to say who you are - in such an event, we will list the winning team submitted, and ask you for permission to publicize your name and email address, at your discretion. We will also probably do some statistical summation about the submitted teams as a whole.
Enter the Contest
(well, actually, the FGL is closed to further entries)
Disclaimers: we're doing this just for fun, as a game to lighten up for submitters the last few hectic or boring hours before the SIGGRAPH deadline, and to have everyone else get involved in thinking about the next SIGGRAPH. We have no affiliation to (besides being enthusiastic members of) SIGGRAPH. We do not plan to make any money from this; if anything, just the opposite.