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2002 ICFP Programming Contest
Posted by
michael
on Fri Aug 30, 2002 02:00 PM
from the gentlemen,-start-your-ides dept.
from the gentlemen,-start-your-ides dept.
Phil Bewig writes "The 2002 ICFP Programming Contest begins today. The programming task will be posted at 12:00 noon Pacific Time." Which should be... just about... now.
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Unlimited Bragging Rights (Score:1)
Very cool task this year (Score:1)
One of the classes at my university last year had to write a simulation like this using Eiffel. Ick!
Solution! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Solution! (Score:4, Funny)
Heh I got a chuckle out of that. I won a Gifted Ed. programming challenge once using a similar technique. We were supposed to write a program in Basic that solved a word problem. Unfortunately, they didn't give us a whole lot of time. So I worked out the answer to the problem. My source code was like this:
10 PRINT "10:30"
Nobody else got the problem right, and the rules were vague enough that displaying the right answer was good enough. Heh. Pretty damn efficient coding, dont'cha think?
Robots drown... (Score:4, Funny)
FUN!! (Score:1, Funny)
Do Not Trust the Pusher Robot! (Score:4, Funny)
Great idea! (Score:5, Funny)
2. Submit the site to Slashdot after downloading/caching all the instructions and requirements.
3. Be the only person to actually have a copy of the directions, therefore, the only person to submit a solution at all, let alone a working one.
4. ??? (Presumably, win the contest)
5. Profit!
missing keys... (Score:4, Funny)
one based array? (Score:4, Funny)
What kind of programming challenge uses a one-based array?
Re:one based array? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, in this case it's a great idea. The game world is bounded by walls, so you can put the walls in the 0 index (and the width+1 index) of your array and not have to explicitly test for the array bounds. Treat them like any other wall.
Fifth Programming Contest (Score:5, Funny)
Man, I've been practicing all year using FORTH. Rats!
SomeThing Awful (Score:1)
UNF UNF UNF
Ambiguous rules (Score:1)
They forgot the most important button... (Score:1)
Pretty neat.. (Score:1)
Instead, the robot would have to discover the world itself; i.e. it would only know about the contents of x number of squares around itself.
And, of course, weapons, weapons, weapons.
looks interesting, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Nathan
There will be.... (Score:5, Informative)
Q1: Will a test server be available?
A: Yes, stay tuned...
This looks like a fun one (Score:2, Interesting)
For the first time, though, I think I may actually enter.
I love that the game is played over sockets, so any language can be used that can implement sockets.
All in all, it sounds like fun.
Programming Languages (Score:5, Funny)
Mad, mad props to the first team to enter a working submission written exclusively in PostScript.
Money? (Score:1)
Dropped packages (Score:1)
You can also drop packages reliably with the shorter command, "UPS".
RedHat only (Score:1)
"Your program will have to run on a PC under Red Hat Linux 7.3. (We do not regret we cannot support any other operating system.)
emphasis added, of course.
If they were going to do this right... (Score:1)
The player controls the robot by issuing commands.
You'd think they would have better package handling standards than USPS and/or UPS!
If you are bored & looking for something to co (Score:2)
Interactive? (Score:2)
I have a feeling that it would be a whole lot easier to win that way...
The winner will be... (Score:1)
Why weren't we notified in advance? (Score:1)
Again, why weren't we notified?
UPS Vs. FedEx (Score:4, Funny)
I bet UPS is secretely sponsoring this competition so it can replace drivers with robots. The competing robots are FedEx drivers, so UPS robots can push the FedEx drivers into fatal squares. Perfect!
Complete Protocol? (Score:1)
The format of the response is list of robot updates. Each robot update is of the form #robot_id and then the actions in the order they happened. A robot is listed if and only if it was alive at the beginning of the turn. The following actions are possible:"
I think that the protocol needs to be updated a little. How do we know when the end of the list of robots is reached?
Anyone remember the old school robot games? (Score:3, Interesting)
You could use any language (that produced a DOS compatible EXE), and I remember coding robots in the early 90's and having a lot of fun. Tournaments still continue for that game!
There was another game in which you had to program a robot that was a race car and get it to go around a track that it had to learn. I forget the name of that, but I heard tournaments also take place for that too.
Does anyone have any links to other cool programming games?
This Contest Brought To You By... (Score:1)
Discrimination against Java (Score:4, Funny)
How are the Java folks supposed to write anything more than a "Hello World" program with so few resources?
Ambiguities and other valuable considerations (Score:2, Interesting)
In other matters, offense seems to be remarkably underpowered. If bots aren't next to each other, the only offense would consist of sitting your bot in a strategic location knowing it can't be passed. Thus offense is only possible on maps with chokes, i.e. thin corridors with walls and water on the sides.
Guarding the home base and packages, and other such "turtling," may be fairly powerful.
Note: offensive and defensive considerations tend to be important only in 1 on 1. In a multi-robot free for all, playing offensive or defensive will likely lose you the game to people who simply deliver packages fast.
As for (1,1) being the corner, I assume this is done so people can simply make (0,y) and (x,0)consist of walls, simplifying the programming.
CoreWars (Score:1)
Sounds a lot like... (Score:1)
Anyone else ever played the RoboRally [wizards.com] board game produced by Wizards of the Coast?
PNot fair... (Score:1)
I mean c'mon, I've got the first football game of the season tomorrow, and after that DJ Icey.
How can you expect me to program between all that drinking, football, drinking, dancing, and drinking? I almost forgot, I have programming to do for class. VHDL sucks btw.
ROLL TIDE!!
I thought this was funny... (Score:1)
Seriously, when I was just skimming the front page that's what I assumed it meant!
Yeah, I know... mod troll, flamebait, off-topic. At least slashdot karma has no real effect on one's fate! I mean, whoever would belie*KABOOM!!!*...
It's RoboRally (Score:3, Informative)
Team play? (Score:3, Interesting)
You could open a socket and have the other robots try to connect, then communicate that way. That might be hard, if for example the robots are running on different machines or the organizers check for open ports.
Since all the robots have almost complete information, you don't need to communicate. Have your robot do a little dance at the beginning, left right left right up down or something, to identify it as a team member. Your robot knows what the team members are doing because it can just compute what their decisions will be. The only information you lack is the weight and destination of a package that a teammate picked up.
You could have the robot with the lowest X & Y coordinates be the leader. The other robots stay around him so he doesn't get bumped. Or carry packages to him to deliver. Or hang next to the home bases, and when another robot moves onto them, bump them so they can't pick the package. Since it takes one turn to pick up a package, I think it would be trivial to make a robot that hanges near a base and can prevent any single other robot from ever picking the package.
ick (Score:1)
Truckin at Xerox PARC, 1983 (Score:2, Informative)
Sure been a lot of progress in the last 20 years...
Here's a good testing strategy (Score:1)
If it fares well against a human, it seems likely it will fare well against other bots.
Boy, this one is gonna be tough.
Do tech schools have teams to do this stuff? Will there be an MIT team?
List of contests? (Score:3, Insightful)
a (regularly updated) list of contests
that are coming up? Like recent (more
or less) Google challenge, etc.
The organisers seem to like Haskell (Score:2, Informative)
The downloadable test server appears to be written in Haskell and compiled with GHC [haskell.org]:
Language ehhh? (Score:2, Interesting)
Peer recognition: Finally, the contest judges agree to state at least once during the presentation of the awards that the winning team's programming language is "the programming tool of choice for discriminating hackers."
Second Prize
Peer recognition: The contest judges agree to state at least once during the presentation of the awards that the winning team's programming language is "a fine programming tool for many applications."
Man, someone *must* do it in BRAINF*CK or even funnier... Visual Basic. You can just imagine them saying that "VB is the programming tool of choice for distriminating hackers"
Well, the deadline's over. (Score:1)
Re:Language/Envirmonment (Score:2)
As far as language, there doesn't seem to be any requirement.
Re:Language/Envirmonment (Score:1)
* Assemblers (gas 2.10.91, nasm 0.98.22)
* C, C++, chill, objective C (gcc 2.96)
* Common Lisp (CLISP 2.29; CMUCL 18d)
* Erlang (R8B-1)
* FORTRAN (g77 2.96)
* Haskell (GHC 5.04; Hugs98-Dec2001; HBC 0.9999.5b)
* Java (gcc 2.96; Jikes 1.15; Sun JDK 1.4.0)
* Lazy ML (lmlc 0.9999.5b)
* Mercury (0.10.1)
* Modula 3 (PM3 1.1.15)
* Objective Caml (3.04)
* Pascal (p2c 1.22)
* Perl (5.6.1)
* PostScript (ghostscript-6.52)
* Prolog (Gnu Prolog 1.2.1)
* Python (1.5.2 and 2.2)
* Ruby (1.6.7)
* SML (Moscow ML 2.00; SML/NJ 110.0.7)
* Scheme (Rice PLT 202; MIT Scheme 7.7.1, scsh 0.5.2, umb-scheme 3.2)
* Tcl (8.3.3 with tclx 8.3)
PLUS binaries
Re:C++ vs. SML for language (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, people often do that. But what they often neglect to tell you, is that it depends upon the task at hand. Still, SML is a nice language, but I wouldn't use it for everything (neither would I use C++ for everything).
If you like functional programming, like static checking (there are no ways around SML's typesystem, you are really, really safe), like strictness (as opposed to lazy functional languages), and like to be able to do some imperative hacking for the last bit of performance, then SML may be for you. If you are into compilers, theorem-provers, computer algebra or anything similar, then SML is definitely for you.
For tasks that are very low-level (i.e. require lot's of bit-fidling), needs to run in small memory-space, needs access to lot's of C or C++ libraries, etc, C++ is definitely more suited.
though it has no/little support for variables
Yes, that's the whole point of functional programming. But SML allows you to declare ref-cells which behave just like variables in normal languages. The downside is that using them makes your code incredibly ugly (something most SML'ers think is good, because it encourages good functional programming style).
A good implementation of SML would run with more or less the same speed as C++, and could also run the same algorithms (since it allows you to use imperative constructs), but it would be better if you used functional algorithms except when you really need to tune for the last clock-cycles. Unfortunately, the "standard" implementation, smlnj, runs more like at half speed of g++. There is another dialect of ML, called Ocaml, which has much more impressive native-code compilers. It is also somewhat more geared towards other programming-styles then the functional one (i.e it supports object-oriented programming really well).
I just red the contest problems; It seems as though it can be easily done in C++ -- anyone have insight on this?
Yes, to avoid being blamed for being biased towards functional programming, the ICFP doesn't usually have problems that are much better suited for functional languages. And there has certainly been contestants using C++ before. The main reason C++ may not fare too well in this contest, is probably because (1) usually the biggest C++ gurus are busy doing other things, while the biggest Ocaml, SML, Haskell, etc, gurus are competing, and (2) Functional languages are often more suitable for rapid prototyping than C++, and development speed is certainly an important ingredient in this competition. But it is definitely not impossible that either C++ or Perl comes out a winner some year.
Re:C++ vs. SML for language (Score:4, Insightful)
the ICFP doesn't usually have problems that are much better suited for functional languages.
That is definitely not true. The tasks are specifically chosen to highlight the unique strengths of functional programming languages, especially compared to imperative languages like C++. This robot problem is a heuristic optimization problem whose solution would require analyzing large trees of possible moves. To do this in C++, you would need to write lots of code that many functional programming languages provide for free. Don't forget Philip Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: "any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
Re:I'll do this in Perl. . . (Score:1)
Now try doing it all in one line ;-)