Contest History
Beginning
Graph Drawing contests are annually held in conjunction with the Symposium of Graph Drawing since 1994. I think the original idea came from Peter Eades and Joe Marks, who were also the first contest organizers. The winners of the first contest received a book as award. Later, cash prices were established. In 2008, gold medals and trophies were awarded to the winners. The results of the contest were furthermore published in the proceedings of the Graph Drawing Symposium, with Springer LNCS.
Categories
Over the years, we had a variety of contest categories:
- Contest graphs (1994 to 2006, 2008)
- Free-style drawings (1998 to 2001, 2004 to 2007)
- Video/interactive exploration (1997)
- Incremental graph drawing (1998)
- Spontaneous mobiles (2000)
- Interactive graph analysis (2002)
- Evolving Graphs (2005)
- FIFA World Cup History (2006)
- Social Network Tools/Innovations (2007)
- Partial Graph Layout (2009)
- On-site challenge (2004 to 2009)
Statistics
Graph Drawing, even though very important, is a subject for very few specialists in the field. Since the contest challenges the state of the art, it is no wonder that the number of submissions is usually not too large. Here is some statistics of the participation in the contest.
- 1994: 4 contest graphs, only winners reported
- 1995: 3 contest graphs, 40 submissions
- 1996: 4 contest graphs, 35 graphs submitted
- 1997: 3 contest graphs, 13 submissions
- 1998: 4 contest graphs, 17 submissions
- 1999: 4 contest graphs, 18 submissions
- 2000: 4 contest graphs, 8 submissions
- 2001: 4 contest graphs, 14 submissions
- 2002: 2 contest graphs, 4 submissions
- 2003: 2 contest graphs, 7 submissions
- 2004: challenge+freestyle, 21 submissions
- 2005: challenge+freestyle+evolving, 17 submissions
- 2006: challenge+4 categories, 20 submissions
- 2007: challenge+free+socialNet, 10 submissions
- 2008: challenge+4 categories, 18 submissions