C is top dog in Google AI Challenge
The Google AI Challenge has just finished and the scores for the 4,619 entries have been made available, along with the language used. Does the language choice of the entries tell us anything?
The following is a list of the 11 most common languages used, the mean and standard deviation of the final score for entries written in that language and the number of entries written in the language:
mean sd entries C 2331 867 18 Haskell 2275 558 51 OCaml 2262 567 12 Ruby 2059 768 55 Java 2060 606 1634 C# 2039 612 485 C++ 2027 624 1232 Lisp 1987 686 32 Python 1959 637 948 Perl 1957 693 42 PHP 1944 769 80
C has the highest mean and Lisp one of the lowest; is this a killer blow for Lisp in AI? (My empirical morality prevented me omitting the inconveniently large standard deviations.) C does have the largest standard deviation; is this because of crashes caused by off-by-one/null pointer errors or lower ability on the authors part? Not nearly enough data to tell.
I am guessing that this challenge would be taken up by many people in their 20s, which would explain the large number of entries written in Java and C++ (the most common languages taught in universities over the last few years).
I don’t have an explanation for the relatively large number of entries written in Python.
How to explain the 0.4% of entries written in C and it top placing? Easy, us older folk may be a bit thin on the ground but we know what we are doing (I did not submit an entry).
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