The winners of the Ore-X Challenge have been announced by Unearthed. We believe this is the first time an operational problem at a mine has been solved via an online competition.
GlassTerra was founded with a view that fundamentally reducing the effort and friction to view, access and exchange mining geospatial data would bring efficiency and innovation to the industry. The Gold Fields Ore-X Challenge has not only solved a mine’s operational problem but also gave us our first evidence that supports our view.
Congratulations to Brian Lynch, whose hard work and persistence produced the algorithm that won the $10,000 AUD first prize! Brian won out of a pool of over 270 contestants who signed up for the challenge, with over 100 submissions lodged from all over the world.
GlassTerra provided support for the competition by hosting an interactive 3D model of the source dataset.
The 3D model on GlassTerra allowed potential competitors to understand the context behind the competition, before deciding whether to enter. We had over 1,000 people from all over the world view the model in the first few weeks after the competition opened.
By the end of the competition, the top 3 placing algorithms were making predictions with the same accuracy as the site geologists. The Gold Fields team of geologists did the final judging and selected the winners based on the quality of their results.
Gold Fields Principal Resource Geologist Shaun Hackett was excited about the outcomes from the competition:
It was a thrilling process to present an operational problem from a Western Australian gold mine on a global platform and see the diversity of solutions that were put forward.
The geology team at the mine who deal with these problems on a day to day basis could immediately see how the winning entry can be put into use straight away to help them out.
Our Ore-X Challenge for Gold Fields was the world’s first crowd-sourced challenge to solve a day-to-day operational problem within the mining industry. The outcome of the challenge is software which can be deployed immediately into production use, with an immediate operational benefit. The Gold Fields mine benefited from the competition by lowering costs and improving safety.
Do you have an operational challenge at your mine which could benefit from opening it up to an innovative solution? If so get in contact with us to talk about how we could help.
Saxon
well done Saxon and team; this is really good stuff! you can be sure I’ll be telling my SA mates about it. Mike