Here’s the announcement: Announcing the Winners of the Open Source Miner Challenge! - Electric Coin Company
@smith88 @Bensam123 It’s a misunderstanding on your part: the submissions were being released right away, back in October, and similarly they were being updated in public in their GitHub repos afterwards. So there’s nothing new to “release” now, and no new “advantages”. The prize fund is $30k.
Rather, the Challenge was primarily about improving the public’s understanding of the Equihash problem, making the optimizations equally known to all. I think (note: I was one of 3 judges) the Challenge is a success.
Before the Challenge, we had “cloud mining” providers claim/offer speeds that were like a hundred of times in excess of zcashd’s, and there were almost no other publicly available solvers/miners for the 200,9 parameters (well, there was a revision of Equihash designers’ code making it work for those parameters, and there was aabc’s sample submission to the Challenge, but these were only moderately faster than zcashd’s, and they were a side-effect of our work on preparing the Challenge).
By the Challenge’s suggested early publication date of October 14, @xenoncat’s submission (now CPU Winner) demonstrated a CPU solver speed that is still nearly the best now, along with documentation on the algorithm and source code (even if in a macro assembler). This has prompted @tromp to promptly open source and submit his light C++ code and his CUDA code as well, and to improve his CPU solver later to bring its speed almost on par with xenoncat’s; unlike other submissions, it also specifically targets the alternate 144,5 parameter set, which might be relevant in the future. Now this is the first Runner Up. Also noteworthy and the second Runner Up is @morpav’s submission, which reached similar speeds (and latest may even be slightly faster than xenoncat’s now, per my testing, but it’s more C++'ish and requires a very recent compiler to achieve that speed).
By Challenge end, we also got Marc Bevand’s SILENTARMY submission (now GPU Winner), a very fast and portable OpenCL solver for Equihash and soon (after Challenge end) also miner for Zcash (until then, the solver was integrated and working in zogminer, which previously used David Jaenson’s solver for a little while - a solver that was also submitted to the Challenge and won the last Runner Up prize).
We are aware that faster proprietary miners for GPUs exist now (hopefully, temporarily, until SILENTARMY catches up or they are open sourced or someone else releases a new open source solver/miner). Some people would think this makes the Challenge “irrelevant”. I strongly disagree: I think the Challenge has served its purpose remarkably well. It improved the understanding on Equihash optimizations, it provided much faster (than would be available otherwise) solvers and miners by and in the first few days after Zcash launch, it narrowed the performance gap between open source and proprietary miners (from ~100x to ~2x), it influenced other solver/miner developers (including proprietary ones, by providing them with an easier to understand problem description and with more ideas to build upon), it influenced the “market” (people trying to sell proprietary miners for big $ before vs. asking for a 2.5% developer fee now), and it helped the mining decentralization (relatively less mining done by “cloud” providers).