A portfolio-based analysis method for competition results
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Competitions such as the MiniZinc Challenges or the SAT competitions have been very useful sources for comparing performance of different solving approaches and for advancing the state-of-the-arts of the fields. Traditional competition setting often focuses on producing a ranking between solvers based on their average performance across a wide range of benchmark problems and instances. While this is a sensible way to assess the relative performance of solvers, such ranking does not necessarily reflect the full potential of a solver, especially when we want to utilise a portfolio of solvers instead of a single one for solving a new problem. In this paper, I will describe a portfolio-based analysis method which can give complementary insights into the performance of participating solvers in a competition. The method is demonstrated on the results of the MiniZinc Challenges and new insights gained from the portfolio viewpoint are presented.
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