Re: NUDT Protest for GTOC9

[Dario Izzo]

Dear Luo Ya-zhong,

Thanks for your mail and for your legitimate protest and demand for
further explanations. I did intend to write a longer email detailing why
by the rules JPL is with no doubts the GTOC9 winner and why their late
submission does not change that, but I decided to write the mail in the
morning from work.

I will thus take the chance of this thread to explain what happened.

By the competition rules any submission made after the deadline is
indeed invalid. And so was the "late" final JPL submission (8 minutes
past the deadline). But JPL did send a mail within the deadline with
their solution, which was allowed as per
https://kelvins.esa.int/gtoc9-kessler-run/discussion/220/#c240in case of
server malfunctioning.

I have not scored manually the files sent by mail mainly because it is
not straight forward to synch the mail time stamps with the server time
stamps and compute the correct score. It is way easier for me to let the
server do it, hence I reopened the submission system for 10 minutes
allowing the server to score the files.

In any case, and I am clarifying this for all other teams who contacted
me on the issue: when a submission is removed what counts is, then, the
last valid submission (These is the general rule in the Kelvins website
and this is what is implemented automatically in all other competitions
we run via the site). Unfortunately the online system I coded for GTOC9
(far from being perfect, I know and I apologize) does not allow to show
the best submission so far, only the latest one. As a consequence, if
teams remove a submission and later submit a worse solution the
leaderboard shows only the last (and worse) submission. I am, just now
manually restoring the best so far for other teams that encountered
server problems during the last 10 minutes and could not submit within
the deadline.

I hope this mail clarifies why I took the decisions I took and restore
your faith is the fairness of the final GTOC9 leaderboard.

Let me know if you have further questions, and apologies for having
given you and your students the feeling of an unjust outcome. This I
regret sincerely and I take it entirely on me and on the suboptimal way
the server reacted during the last final important moments.

I hope to see you in Japan where we can further discuss this openly.

Dario


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[Dario Izzo]

Dear Dr. Luo Ya-zhong

Thanks for your mail, and great congratulations to you and your students
for an awesome performance that will go down in GTOC history.

I had heard about the CTOC. Is there some online resource containing the
problems that have been released so far? I would like to add a link to
the GTOC portal to resources of interest and the CTOC would certainly be
one ...

Dario



On 05/03/2017 10:26 AM, 罗亚中 wrote:
> Dear Dr. Izzo,
>
> Thank you very much for your patient explanation. We understand the sever issues in the last ten minutes before the deadline of the competition and give congrats to JPL for their victory.
>
> As I just mentioned in the last email, the students in my group and I have devoted many days and great efforts to the competition and frankly we desire to win it. When we sought the leaderboard just at the closed time of the competition, we were very excited and a little emotional. Some members in my team even thought that this might be a small joke from JPL (they have been the champion so many times), and this time they might not want to stay on the first place of the leaderboard any more ha ha. So we wrote you an email immediately to enquire about the issue and hope you could understand.
>
> The GTOC is not only a contest, but more importantly, an open platform for researchers, experts as well as students from all over the world to communicate with each other and share their experience in the field of orbit design. We really appreciate that your group in ESA initiated the first GTOC and provided us such a good platform. We also would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to the hosts of all the subsequent competitions for their great efforts to put forward more challengeable and innovative contest problems so as to make this platform more attractive and better. Inspired by the GTOC, China has also initiated our own trajectory optimization competition, named CTOC, which we believe could help improve the overall level of orbit design of China. By participating these trajectory optimization competitions, we have gained much experience which is quite helpful for us to work for some practical space missions such as the Chinese Shen-zhou capsule mission. Meanwhile, the techniques we use in those practical missions have also helped us a lot to solve the competition problems. So we really appreciate all the hosts of the GTOC.
>
> The GTOC9, in particular, has brought creative ideas and techniques for the competition. Firstly, this is the first time that all participating teams could submit their results online and see the corresponding scores immediately. And the best scores of other teams are also listed on the leaderboard, which makes the competition more like a game, more competitive and more attractive. Besides, the automatic validation procedure provided by the submission system has also brought great convenience to all participants because we do not need to spend time on validating the results by ourselves. Consequently, more teams could submit valid solutions. The GTOC9 this year has attracted 69 teams from universities, research institutions and industry sectors from all over the world, which is by far the largest competition in the history of GTOC. We believe the ideas and mechanism created in the competition are worth carrying forward to make GTOC better and better.
>
> We still remember two years ago when we first participated in GTOC. It was new but pretty attractive for us though eventually we only got a not good rank. In the workshop of that competition hosted in Italy, we were very excited to see so many high-level teams and tried our best to learn from them. Particularly, the group from JPL, led by Dr. Anastassios Petropoulos, really impressed us, and we still treasured the picture with Dr. Anastassios Petropoulos.
>
> Finally we appreciate again your efforts in the competition and give congrats to JPL for winning this challengeable contest. The competition is interesting and we really enjoy it. We look forward to meeting you in the workshop in the next month in Japan and learning the marvelous strategies to solve the contest problem from JPL and all other participating teams.
>
>
> Best Regards,
>
> Dr. Luo Ya-zhong
>
>
>
>> -----Original Messages-----
>> From: "Dario Izzo" <dario...@esa.int>
>> Sent Time: 2017-05-02 16:30:44 (Tuesday)
>> To: "罗亚中" <lu...@nudt.edu.cn>
>> Cc: gtoc_com...@googlegroups.com
>> Subject: Re: NUDT Protest for GTOC9

[Petropoulos, Anastassios E (392M)]

Dear Dr. Luo Ya-zhong,

Thank you and your team for your congratulations.  Our JPL team extends our congratulations to your team, which lead the leaderboard for most of the competition with such a strong solution.  This is an impressive leap from GTOC7!

The leaderboard indeed added a considerable element of excitement to the competition.  When we saw your solution being updated in the final hours, we all held our breaths.  In the last half hour, we were attempting to reorder our mission submissions to prepare for a potential late-breaking solution that we were working on.  Unfortunately, we ran out of time to submit that solution, but hope to present it at the GTOC9 workshop.

We look forward to meeting you at the workshop and learning about the methods you used for finding such a competitive solution.

Best regards,

-anastassios

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