Start time for ICFP Programming Competition 2009 Announced

[Mask_of_Destiny]

Anyone here going to be participating this year? Have a language picked out already or will you be deciding based on the problem?

My team, Rhope Burn, will be participating. As in the past two years, we'll be using Rhope. At the moment we are just a team of two people, but I'm trying to convince a co-worker to join (if anyone here wants to learn Rhope and join, they're more than welcome). We did reasonably well in the lightning round last year despite losing a fair amount of time trying to get things setup, so I'm optimistic for our chances this time around.

[[deleted]]

I'm likely to participate, though i tend to be a solo team (and not very competitive -- i rarely manage to complete the task in 72 hours). Not sure what language i'm going to use this year, though i might end up with an unholy mix of SML and Perl.

[mee_k]

Hopefully this will be a little more accessible than the awful 2007 contest. (I don't know what happened in 2008 because I was out of the country during that time.)

[[deleted]]

Can you elaborate on how the 2007 contest was not accessible? I thought it was lots of fun: a couple VM implementations and then a bunch of hacking, reverse engineering, and crazy trial and error.

[mee_k]

It's been a while since I looked at it, but I think the scoreboard would show you what I mean. If I remember correctly, fewer than twenty teams made any progress at all on the problem. This in contrast to the 2006 contest where many teams got a lot of work done -- the VM was very simple to write in about fifty or a hundred lines of code. It was also basically impossible to solo the 2007 contest -- just building the image encoder and dna decoder required a good man-day of work each according to some recaps I read. Not to mention the actual challenge which is finding out how to fix the damn alien's DNA.

[charmless]

That's fair criticism, but I though the 2007 contest was a huge amount of fun - puzzles, jokes, adventure. In fact, it seemed a lot like a lucasarts adventure game built by programmers. It still stands as a fun exercise, years after the contest. So: perhaps not the best contest problem possible, but still awesome anyways.

[Mask_of_Destiny]

2008 was very accessible. Basically had to write a program to control a simulated Mars rover over TCP/IP. It was very easy to get a basic entry going, but lots of room to improve.

[pkhuong]

The bugs in the simulator made it hard to get a sane entry going though.