Problem 10 of MATLAB cody challenge

Or since 2017a:

which would probably give the best non-cheating score you could get with the current version of cody.

Ah, that's interesting :)

gives size 16. Whereas

gives size 13.

How exactly is the size computed? And how can the leading solution be size 9?

Most of the very low scoring solutions no longer work. The two 9 overwrite assert.m with a system command. The 10s use regexp with a dynamic regular expression to execute code and bypass assignment to the function with the so-called ans trick.

For better or for worse, the score of a cody solution only depends on the number of nodes in the parse tree of the code. You can see the parse tree of code with the undocumented mtree class.

There are plenty of tricks to get low score. Command form, if possible, cost less than function form. A char array regardless of its length only cost one so stuffing code in text helps. Compare:

Omitting assignment using ans also helps:

As demonstrated above, low scoring solutions are rarely good matlab code and are often inefficient. They are optimised for the scoring system, not for the speed of execution or readability.