This is the 5th Draft of this contest/website.

News



Welcome

to BATTLE, which stands for Battle Against Taking Too Long for data Exchange. This site is geared towards the advancement of data compression and also as a reference for various algorithms. Therefore the purpose of the contests is to find who can write the best algorithms.

There are strict rules for participating in BATTLE, however everyone who visits this site will benifit somehow.

There are three catagories:

Within each catagory there is three contests:

I mentioned contests, but there is no actual prizes. What you win is ultimate fame, and glory! You will be known as the current winner.

Contests

The first contest deadline is April 10th, 1999. At that time all submissions will be judge according to their criteria (Ratio, Speed, Requirements) and the results will be placed on this website.

Judges

Curently I am judging the 3 'general compression' contests. Michael Schindler is judging image compression and Jeff Gilchrist is judging Sound compression.

The judges are responsible for finding the test data, no later then March 4th 1999. If you want to help them find data that meets the criteria, please email them. They would appreciate the help.

Both the sound and image utilities are in here and is 440KB. Both programs work, but need work. Feel free to submit changes. If anyone could 'code proof' them, I would appreciate it. They both need an x86 running dos. The image viewer needs a 24-bit display. It can autosize to 1024x768, 800x600 and 640x480 as needed. Sound requires a SB16 compatible sound card.

Small Sound Samples are here. The stereo one is called sample1.dat it is 2.6MB. The mono one is called sample2.dat it is 1.3MB. Both are in the BATTLE sound format. Both were created by ModPlug Tracker (Olivier Lapicque), the actual music was created by Future Crew (Sample1) and Martin Samuelsson (Sample2). Both files should be 15 seconds. If you have a better sample and would like to post it please make a comment.

Sample images of VLA are available here and are 750KB all together. There is one example of each type. The 8BPP image really bites. If you have a better one, please make a comment.

The overall goal of the contests is to provide the programmers of the world with a good rich resource of compression algorithms

Rules and Regulations

There is a master set of rules, then there are rules for each category.

The master rules are as follows:

  1. All submissions must be original code. They may not be copied from pre-existing packages, or sources. You may base your algorithm on a pre-existing package however.
  2. You may not base your code on a current submission. You can base it on previous submissions (for any previous contest), with the authors permission however.
  3. All submissions must follow the programming API as defined in the shell program. This is to keep testing fair and simple.
    1. All projects must contain a working 'makefile' for GCC.
    2. All projects must compile with GCC (DJGPP)
    3. All projects must interface with SHELL.C
    4. Submissions must be in either '.tar.gz' or '.zip' format.
      They will be stored in '.zip' format on the site.
  4. All submissions must be in ANSI C, with proper comments. Source-Shrouding is NOT permitted. The source code must compile with either GNU C (DJGPP for ms-dos) or LCC (LCC-WIN32). Other compilers are accepted (for testing). Judgement will be performed either in Win95 (command prompt) or ms-dos.
  5. All submissions must be emailed to here.
  6. You may release copyrighted or patented software (must be your own), however, the source code must be submitted with the intent of allowing it to be used in free software (non-profit). (See FSF for more info).

Any disobediance of these rules, will require re-submission.



Rules for General Compression Contest

The rules for 'General Compression Algorithms' are as follows:

  1. All of the master rules.
  2. Must be able to compress TEXT (7bit) and BINARY (8bit) data files.
  3. Must be lossless
  4. The test will consist of 5 Text files (english), and 5 Binary files (3 Program Files, 1 Image (8bpp palette), and 1 Sound File (mono))

Rules for Image Compression Contest

The rules for 'Image Compression Algorithms' are as follows:

  1. All of the master rules.
  2. The file format is documented here
  3. The test will consist of the following categories: 8bpp palette images, 8bpp grayscale, and 24bpp color.
    There will be five 8bpp palette images, three 8bpp grayscale and two 24bpp color files.
    For a total of ten images.
  4. The algorithm must be able to handle all 3 formats (it may perform internal conversions)
  5. The algorithms may be lossy. Judgement will be out of 10, 10 being the image is lossless, and 1 being the image is bad (quality). This is upto the judge.

Rules for Sound Compression Contest

The Rules for the 'Sound Compression Algorithms' are as follows:

  1. All of the master rules.
  2. The file format is described here
  3. The test will consist of 4 files. Two big files, and two small files. The big files are 5 minutes long (one stereo and one mono). The small files are 15 seconds long (one stereo and one mono). Only the small files are posted.
  4. The algorithm must be able to handle stereo and mono data. (It may perform internal conversions)
  5. The algorithms may be lossy. Judgement will be out of 10, 10 being the sound is lossless, and 1 being the sound is bad (quality). This is upto the judge.


Sub-catagory contests


Rules for any Compression Ratio contest

The rules for 'Maximum Compression Ratio' are as follows:

  1. All of the master rules.
  2. All of the category (General, Image or Sound) rules.
  3. Memory limit is: 32MB total per file
  4. Time Limit: 1 hour per file.
  5. Points are awarded on compression ratio. As follows:
    Points = (1 - (output_size / input_size)) * 100

Rules for any Compression Speed contest

The rules for 'Compression Speed' are as follows:

  1. All the master rules.
  2. All of the category (General, Image or Sound) rules.
  3. Memory limit of: 8MB total per file.
  4. Time limit of 20 minutes (1200 seconds) per file.
  5. Points are award on time. Which is calculated as:
    time_in_seconds = (compression_time + decompression_time) / 2
    insize = size on input file
    outsize = size of output file
    All the above values are averages for the test suite.

    Points = (1200 - time_in_seconds) * (1 - (outsize / insize))
    If you are over 1200 seconds you are disqualified.
  6. Speed is measured on the judges computer. The test will be performed under DOS. They will be compiled with DJGPP v2.02 and the following switches: '-O3 -mpentium -fomit-frame-pointer '.

Rules for any Minimum Requirements contest

The rules for 'Minimum Requirements' are as follows:

  1. All the master rules.
  2. All of the category (General, Image or Sound) rules.
  3. Memory limit of: 0.25MB (256 KB)
  4. Points are awarded on the compression ratio vs. memory used.
  5. Can't use any floating point hardware. (Includes 'float', 'double' and 'long long' data types).
  6. There is a bonus point for using only 8-bit and 16-bit data types.
  7. There are bonus points for memory usage too. Points are awarded like so:
    Points = (256KB - (memory_required_in_kb)) * (1 - (outsize / insize))


Links



This is the 5th draft of this contest. I expect many changes to take place. I welcome your input and expect this site to be benificial. I will be adding a submissions page to this site, so you can view others submissions.

If there are any problems with this draft, or if you have any questions please email me at tomstdenis@goplay.com. I am glad to help. If you put 'BATTLE: ' as the first word in the subject I will be able to respond faster. (I get alot of email)




This site is hosted on Tripod.Com

Last changed: March 2nd 1999

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