In december we published the results of the third run of the misc live competition on the mancoosi website. I left this post in my draft folder for a quite a while now. I’ll publish for posterity…
The main difference from the last misc competition is the introduction of a new track, the user track, where we we want to answer the user request, and look for an optimal solution according to an optimization criterion provided by the user.
The initial assessment of the results are quite positive. We received 6 submissions for the trendy and paranoid track and 4 for the user track. These are very interesting results. We don’t have a clear winner on all tracks as in the misc 2010 competition. The cudf2msu4trendy-1.0 from INESC wins the trandy and user1 track. The aspcud-paranoid-1.3 from the university of posdam is the best on the paranoid track, while cudf2pbo4user-1.0 is the winner of the track user2 and user2.
The track paranoid and trendy are the same as in misc 2010. We actually used the same problems as in misc2010 plus 4 new categories (sarge…sid) that are a collection of problems featuring the same installation request but with increasingly large number of packages and versions per packages.
A few words on the new user track. Since in this track the optimization function was given to the solver as an additional input, we decided to try out different criteria. The first one, in user1 is what I called the “Paranoid upgrade” criteria and all problems used in this track are (real) upgrade problems. In cudf the upgrade semantic allow to effectively not upgrade at all a package (since in the solution its version must be greater or equal or the version currently installed). This definition does not goes very well together with the paranoid criteria as the best solution for an upgrade would always be a solution that do not change anything. For this reason the we defined the new criteria as ‘-notuptodate,-removed,-changed’ where solutions that privilege new (upgraded) packages are preferred to solution that do not change anything at all.