Fantasy Graphics League

The 2002-2003 draft season for the Fantasy Graphics League (FGL) has begun. Now that the alien masters have landed and have claimed our world as their spawning planet, the new world order demands that everything be quantized and justified. Computer graphics researchers are now rated by how many times they have been published in SIGGRAPH the past five years, based on the simple formula:

    Researcher's value in quatloos = Sum of ( 60 / A )

rounded to the nearest multiple of 5 (or 10, if over 100), where "A" is the number of authors that contributed to a paper. So if a researcher was a part of two papers, being the only author of one of them and one of 4 authors on the other, the value would be:

    value = ( 60 / 1 ) + ( 60 / 4 ) = 75 Quatloos

Your value is directly proportional to your chance of being taken aboard the mothership and avoid the exoterrafication that's coming up, so make sure to submit, submit, submit to SIGGRAPH this year.

This contest is to allow the rest of us drones to have a tiny but finite chance of securing pod-space on the lower decks of the mothership. (Or, if you're not buying this back-story, just hire a lab because it's fun, or something. There are no alien masters, it's really just a joke, really.)

Here are the rules:

• Your budget is 400 Quatloos.
• You can hire up to 12 researchers.
• You can hire from all people who have had a paper in SIGGRAPH in the past five years.
• You have until midnight PST on January 22, 2003, to create and submit your lab. Actually, let's extend that to Ground Hog's day/James Joyce's birthday, February 2, 2003, since this site was down for a few weeks in January.

Also, you can check out the results of last year's contest, back in the carefree days before the whip-tentacles of our masters helped us towards increased productivity.

We love our superiors!