GTOC8 - issue with some email address domains

[Anastassios E Petropoulos]

Dear GTOC researchers,

Some email domains are apparently getting blocked - I cannot send emails to, or receive emails from,  "163.com"  or  "qq.com"  (common in China) and perhaps other domains as well.  Please try, if at all possible, to send using  "gmail.com",  "outlook.com"  or similar addresses instead.

Thank you,

-anastassios

[D. Kriesel]

Dear all,

My to cents with respect to 163.com: Lots of chinese academic spam (for
example, but not limited to, the infamous CFPs for "interdisciplinary
virtual conferences") come from that domain.

It is so much spam lots of mailservers block the entire domain right away,
some even automatically. Actually, I'm quite amazed to hear from you today
that there indeed seem to be non-spam 163 users :-)

Cheers
David


Am 28. Mai 2015 04:16:40 schrieb Anastassios E Petropoulos
<Anastassios....@jpl.nasa.gov>:

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[Petropoulos, Anastassios E (392M)]

Dear GTOC Teams and GTOC researchers,

It is with great pleasure that I finally announce the results of the GTOC8.  The winners for this edition, as you will see in the attached solution rankings, are Team 14, who hereby also reclaim the title for the most "medals" won in the GTOC series (http://sophia.estec.esa.int/gtoc_portal/?page_id=94 , to be updated).  Team 14 is the combined ESA/ACT-JAXA/ISAS team, whose members, Dario Izzo, Daniel Hennes, Marcus Märtens, Ingmar Getzner, Krzysztof Nowak, Anna He ernan, Stefano Campagnola, Chit Hong Yam, Naoya Ozaki, and Yoshihide Sugimoto, deserve hearty congratulations.  Although the cost function was unusual compared to previous GTOCs, their solution's winning margin can be said to be considerably larger than the winning margins in previous editions.

Congratulations to all the teams who participated, especially the new-comers!  Although there were some large revisions that were made during verification to the cost functions for some teams, even if the revisions had not been made, the rankings would have stayed the same (just barely in one case).  In some cases, there were inconsistencies between the report and the data files - I went with the data files.  The solution files for about a third of the teams departed significantly from the requested content and conventions (this in addition to several teams with relatively minor dupartures), which made verification more challenging than normal.  To mitigate this, one simple idea for future GTOCs might be to permit a revised set of data files to be submitted up to 3 days after the deadline for reporting the objective function (and perhaps some other numbers) for the solution.

I will announce plans for the GTOC8 workshop in the near future, and will also release a summary of the solutions returned for GTOC8.  Stay tuned.

Thank you all again for your participation.  I look forward to the next GTOC, and congratulate again the winning ACT-ISAS team!

Best regards,

-anastassios petropoulos

[Dario Izzo]

Dear all,

we are obviously very happy to celebrate such an achievement and we thought to honor the day  producing a video (thanks python for matplotlib!!) of our trajectory we would like to share http://sophia.estec.esa.int/gtoc_portal/?page_id=560 

We are looking forward to meeting all of you at the upcoming workshop,

Regards,

Dario Izzo

[Petropoulos, Anastassios E (392M)]

Dear Dario,

A very nice and informative animation of your trajectory, and fitting music! Thanks, and again congratulations to you and your team-mates on choreographing the winning Pas de trois.

-anastassios petropoulos

[Ingo Althoefer]

Hi Dario,

lots of congratulations to you and your team. You "found" a fantastic
solution with an almost unbelievable score.

And the artistic video is simply marvellous: you should get an Oscar for it.

Cheers,
Ingo (from Team GlasgowJena+; Rank 9 in GTOC-8).


Zitat von Dario Izzo <dario...@gmail.com>:

[Dario Izzo]

Thanks Ingo,

but I only chose and synchronized the music and annotations. 

The credit for the video (and for our fly-by targeting technique) goes to our applied mathematician Ingmar Getzner (ingmar_dot_getzner_at_gmail.com), who, in case anyone is interested, is looking around for Ph.D. offers in the field of optimization / trajectory optimization .... starting in 2016.

Dario

[Marcus Canby]

As a "lay" observer of this fascinating competition, I am curious as to why only half the registrants submitted solutions. Is it the difficulty? Or do most drop out due to time constraints/other commitments?

[Dario Izzo]

My guess is that the reasons some teams do not hand in a solution can be one of the following

1) Some teams register in the hope the problem will be somehow familiar to them (and their tools). When a problem is released that is very far from what they thought, the team does not make the time investment needed to acquire the necessary knowledge.

2) Some teams find a solution along the month, but they are not confident/happy with it and decide to not submit it. This is actually a real pity as all methods are valuable and teams should not be 'afraid' to propose their even if the final score is not as high as they would like. Extremely innovative solution methods are indeed unlikely to win the competition and they would thus need some kind of 'protection' mechanism. I often thought about proposing the institution of some kind of "Jury Prize" to encourage teams to dare.

3) Some teams are just caught in the middle of extremely busy weeks and cannot allocate the time to run the competition. (a clear and upfront planning from the organizers helps a lot, but its unavoidable that this may happen)

Dario

[Ryan Russell]

 

Greetings:   First, I  give kudos to Stas for putting on a great competition this year and wish a hearty congrats to the winning team!  Regarding the question raised my Marcus,  I would echo Dario’s comments, and add the following:   I personally have participated to some degree in every competition.  This year I signed up, but did not submit a solution.  In my case the reason is 100% the level of time commitment required (time required of course is coupled with difficulty of the problem).   The timing is unpredictable- this year I had 8 days of ‘off the grid’ vacation planned, and my best students were at internships or frantically preparing for graduation.  I of course wanted/planned to submit a solution this year, and in fact at least 10 days completely devoted to it, but I simply couldn’t get it done this round.   The GTOCs have been great experiences for me, I’ve really enjoyed participating and interacting with the community.   That said, because of the extraordinary time commitments required to do well, I have always  been an advocate to space out the competitions by at least two years if not more, otherwise its simply impossible to compete and maintain a steady job- and not get burnt out by the event.  So I would take the opportunity here to reinforce that view, and make it like the Olympics or World Cup and compete at least every two years, perhaps consider 4.   Cheers, Ryan

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[Ingo Althoefer]

Hello everybody,

Ryan Russell wrote:
> ... The GTOCs have been great experiences for me, I've really

> enjoyed participating and interacting with the community.

100 percent the same with me, although Jena participated only four times
so far (GTOC 5 to 8).

> ... I have always been an advocate to space out the competitions by

> at least two years if not more, otherwise its simply impossible to
> compete and maintain a steady job- and not get burnt out by the event.

The same with me. GTOC means that the rest of life almost stops for four
weeks (and then another month or so for awaiting the results ;-)

> So I would take the opportunity here to reinforce that view, and
> make it like the Olympics or World Cup and compete at least every
> two years, perhaps consider 4.

Having in mind that new teams (from Brasilia, Iran, India ...) should not
have to wait too long for entering, I would like to advocate a GTOC about
every two years.

Cheers, Ingo.

PS. Back in 1959's the Soviets had a fantastic early space mission with their
Luna 3: Sending it to the moon, making gravity assist there, also photos
of the back side, returning to near earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_3
And in the planing phase they even had investigated to have a second
moon flyby later ...

[Jacob A Englander]

I must agree with Ryan and Ingo. Unfortunately my ability to compete in GTOC is always a function of what is going on with active missions and with the mission proposal cycle. But I fear for those of us that work missions and mission proposals, our life is somewhat stochastic! I will always hope to jump into GTOC whenever I can but sometimes it just does not work out.

[Ingo Althoefer]

Hi,

I just found another applicant for the space trajectory Oscar:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT0k99hCY5I
727 thousand hits already...

The music is by Giorgio Moroder. The older ones of us still know Giorgio
from the title song for the 1984 Olympic games:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Liw4Z6StgL8

Ingo.

[Nittin Arora]

Once every year (or 1.5 years, alternating between spring and fall) is not that bad if there is sufficient planning and communication done upfront by the hosting team. Maybe we should have a vote at NAPA Valley on this. 

I totally support the idea of "Jury Prize", as proposed by Dario. Right now teams with highly optimized/legacy tools have an advantage. There should be some incentive for new and innovative (not so optimized) approaches as well , even if they don't result in the a good solution.

thanks,

Nitin

[Gao Tang]

Hi! Everybody,

I cannot agree more with Ryan because another competition is also going on in China which is held every year too. You know, if we had to participate in both competitions every year, 2-3 months would be spent.

Although such competitions are really amazing chances to improve our skills as well as challenging problems which are worth investigating, too much time are taken. As a student, I am usually supposed to do other researches, finish other projects, and prepare for graduation.

In conclusion, I wish that the Olympic of Trajectory Design could be held every two years (PS, four years is actually too long a time). The time to start a new GTOC could be announced earlier to help us arrange enough time in advance (Perhaps one year or half a year before?).

(PS. I'm now a master candidate and looking for a professor who wish to be my supervisor to help me puruse a PhD. Please do not hesitate to contact me so that I can give you more details about myself if any of you were interested.)

Best wishes.

Gao Tang

School of Aerospace Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

paper...@gmail.com
+86 13601330173

[Jan Niklas Hasse]

Am Dienstag, 29. September 2015 05:53:54 UTC+2 schrieb Marcus Canby:

As a "lay" observer of this fascinating competition, I am curious as to why only half the registrants submitted solutions.  Is it the difficulty? Or do most drop out due to time constraints/other commitments?

Hi everybody,

the reason we couldn't submit a valid solution was indeed the difficulty.

As I'm still working on this topic as part of my Masters thesis, and since it's all very new to me, I wanted to ask, if anyone has released any of their code? Even the solution files would me help, is it possible to get them?

@Dario
Thanks for the video! It helped me a lot.

Best regards
Jan Niklas

[Chris A]

For what it is worth, I have posted my own solution code and method here:

https://github.com/ChrisAndre/GTOC8

It unfortunately does not employ low-thrust arcs, so there may not be any insights to be had, but I was able to secure a valid solution with it.

Regards,

Chris.

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