ICFP Programming Contest 2014

http://icfpcontest.org/specification.html

by thoughtpolice • 12 years ago

139 18 12 years ago

In the interest of promoting friends/coworkers: The contest this year is a really cool challenge, and was set up by one of my partners in crime, Duncan. (Of course, ICFP is always a cool challenge and is always set up by good people :)

Get a team together and start competing!

eru• 12 years ago

(Of course, ICFP is always a cool challenge and is always set up by good people :)

I agree in general. Only that car engine / fuel challenge a few years ago was really obtuse. (And when I met the guys who set it up, they were so happy about it. ;o)

Lambda the Ultimate and the satelites were really cool!

agumonkey2• 12 years ago

Enjoyed a lot watching teams live streaming their work on youtube. High value time spender.

lucvh• 12 years ago

Do you know if any teams will be doing the same this year? Would love to watch.

agumonkey2• 12 years ago

I don't even remember how I got to follow them. Maybe through reddit

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2bngvp/the_icfp...

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/2blpt6/icfp_contest...

btczeus• 12 years ago

For the love of Zeus use logarithmic graphs for the price! http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg60zczsg2012-01... It does a lot more sense, doesn't it?

ska• 12 years ago

It probably makes even more sense in the right comment thread...

kenjackson• 12 years ago

While I'm a fan of the ICFP, I do feel as if the questions are a bit too full of themselves (for lack of a better term).

While I'm sure they are trying to remove ambiguity, but the way they are couched and their length make them a lot less approachable than they should be. I feel like in about 1/10 the wording and narrative complexity they could create an equally interesting programming challenge.

clamprecht• 12 years ago

I agree, but I think that's part of the challenge - boiling down the problem to its essentials, and ignoring the unnecessary stuff.

drdaeman• 12 years ago

No me, nothing beats ICFPC'07 (http://save-endo.cs.uu.nl/)

The whole task was just formulated as "save Endo". A spec of Fuun DNA (a virtual machine), Endo's DNA and a two pictures were provided. That's about all contestants were told. Then, we had to discover Endo's DNA contained loads of fun things inside.

Oh, ICFPC'06 was incredibly cool, too, but I didn't participated at that time and only took the task years after that. Don't want to sound whining but other years are more conventional (a complex, but mostly well-defined task) so less fun in my opinion.

owlish2• 12 years ago

So... what does ICFP stand for? I've looked on their site, Twitter, and GitHub, but maybe I'm missing something obvious?

akavel• 12 years ago

One level up, at: http://icfpcontest.org/

[The ICFP Programming Contest 2014 is the 17th instance of the annual programming contest series sponsored by The ACM SIGPLAN] International Conference on Functional Programming.

owlish2• 12 years ago

Ah, missed that in the wall of text. Thanks!

keenerd2• 12 years ago

(Posted about the contest an hour earlier, only got two votes. Oh well.)

If I am reading the problem correctly, there is no interactive component this year? You get one submission and don't get to test it against anything else.

It is not essential that the judges be able to run your code

So is this a beauty pageant?

thedufer• 12 years ago

We request (but do not strictly require) that you include in your .tar.gz/.zip various additional material

That's the part they don't have to be able to run. They won't even try unless your entry is in the running, it seems.

The .ghc and .gcc (the actual submission) does have to run, since that's what's being scored.

keenerd2• 12 years ago

It makes a little more sense if you don't think about the game as an assembly of parts, which isn't really explained anywhere. For example there is some strategy with trying to make the ghosts be as bad as possible, so they are in a nice neat line immediately after a power pill.

As usual, kudos to the team for making a puzzle with so many layers.

personZ• 12 years ago

So the strategy for the GCC (the Lambda-man controller) is that you actually build a compiler/pre-processor for it in some other tool, versus just logically solving the problem with the given instruction set?

The details on the ghosts are dramatically clearer than the details on the Lambda man.

Fando• 12 years ago

The only thing I know about functional programming is that I know nothing about it.

ICFP Programming Contest 2014

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