There's probably a captcha or something similar to prevent bots. The number of entries is capped at 10M, and I don't think the time the contest is open will be the prevailing constraint, given all the publicity.
Some caltech students did something like this with a mcdonalds contest back in the seventies, only they did it with a lineprinter in the campus computer center as well as a hydraulic paper cutter at a commercial print shop.
Caltech got a lot of really bad press as a result so when they inevitably won most of the prizes they donated them all to charity.
It is for this specific reason that these contents now say "one entry per visit".
Another interesting thing from this is that it sounds like they will be awarding grand prizes for the best entry at set deadlines. In the first contest you had to improve on Cinematch by 10% to qualify to win the grand prize.
I wouldn't be surprised if we see some early submissions with a whole host of updates leading into the final contest hours. My fear is that there will be a number of last–minute submissions on the eve of the contest closing.
Either way, if you know OpenCL or CUDA, you can probably land some easy money here.
Thanks. Can the information about the prize cutoff be added to the official rules or the FAQ?
Based on this, I think someone with $10000 deposited would appear in the winners list about 4 times a year, assuming those that win the $15 prize appear on the list of winners.
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