This Friday, November 30, we will announce the winners of the 2012 Essay Contest, "Questioning the Foundations". We'd like to start the countdown to the big event now with some thanks and brief closing remarks.
This was our biggest contest by far, in terms of both the number of entrants and the general amount of activity in the contest forums. The contest had 271 entries, up from 161 for our previous contest "Digital or Analog?" - an almost 70% increase. About 100 of the entries, or just over 33%, came from authors who entered a previous essay contest. By comparison, in last year's contest we had about 50 return entrants, or again about 33%. These numbers show that our entrant pool has sizable components of both "regulars" and newcomers, and that both components grew remarkably since the last contest.
The entries came from all over the world, from Australia, China, Finland, India, Kenya, Mexico, Poland, South Africa, Uruguay, Vietnam and of course Ze USA, as well as many other countries. Thanks to all of our entrants and to everyone else who took part in the online discussions.
We did have some growing pains to go with this growth. In particular, we had some issues with the voting system, including invalid duplicate votes. Fortunately, we were able to identify and remove these false votes as we went along, so that they did not have an effect on the finalist pool or on the final results.
We will continue to experiment with better methods for managing future contests, including the voting system and the use of the online forums. We expect to make changes to the voting for the next contest, to cut back on the opportunity and motive for "gaming" the voting system (legally or illegally). We will also make changes soon to the forums that should help keep all discussions productive, educational, and informative.
We have received lots of suggestions for changes already, and we encourage everyone to continue sharing ideas, whether you were a contest entrant or not. Feel free to post suggestions here, or to contact us at mail@fqxi.org.
And stay tuned as we announce the contest winners this Friday.