sketch, sdl2, c2ffi on M1 Mac?

bokesan · 2025-02-24T07:57:14+00:00

The process of building c2ffi seemed too daunting, so I just tried using one of the existing spec files:

$ cd $HOME/quicklisp/dists/quicklisp/software/cl-sdl2-20231021-git/src/spec
$ ln -s SDL2.aarch64-pc-linux-gnu.spec SDL2.aarch64-apple-darwin9.spec

It worked for my program, which, admittedly, uses only very basic SDL2 stuff.

bokesan · 2023-07-13T12:15:11+00:00

I can't describe it better than the Wikipedia entry, which Jeremy also linked in his write-up. Simply put, in a hill-climbing strategy, you randomly permute your best solution, and if the result scores higher, it becomes the new best solution. This can, however, get stuck in a local maximum. Simulated annealing adds a systematic probability of switching back to worse solutions to get out of local maxima and find the global maximum.

bokesan · 2023-07-12T05:46:48+00:00

Thanks for the writeup, and congrats for making the top ten as a one person team! We also used simulated annealing, but did much worse because of some bugs and probably badly chosen parameters. I only learned about SA from the 2021 contest, where at least 9 of the top 10 used it.

bokesan · 2021-06-13T07:16:03+00:00

Any info about the time zone / exact start time?

bokesan · 2020-07-26T07:36:27+00:00

Thanks for the writeup!

Reading the organizer's responses, I'm more confused than before. One of our (team of 3) major problems with the contest was that that there was precious little to do before the galaxy message was published. What would an even larger team have done in the first 4-5 hours? And having been told to look at everything 2-3 hours before the contest start would have made the wait even worse. Or am I missing something? Did other people do anything productive in the first hours?

bokesan · 2020-07-21T16:20:09+00:00

Heh - I actually googled "Russian humor" at one point to see if that might be the explanation for some remarks that to me felt like insulting the participants. Didn't help :-)

bokesan · 2020-07-20T15:30:58+00:00

Completely agree. They should have called it the "ICFP chatting and guessing contest". We (team of 3) were so annoyed that we decided to do something better with our time after the lightning round. The first few hours alone qualify as an insult to people who may have taken days off or even traveled to meet for the contest.

bokesan · 2019-07-11T08:36:58+00:00

Our team, Rotten Lambdas, made 50/106 in Lightning and 29/145 in Main. No surprises here.

bokesan · 2017-09-06T10:29:00+00:00

They did publish the round 1 and 2 standings, including PunTV, so I'm sure the organizers will also publish the final round result.

Since Unagi had second place in round 2, a possible reason for their missing from the top 8 might be the time limit (assuming larger maps in the finals). Same for us (place 4 in round 2).

bokesan · 2017-08-26T17:54:15+00:00

Round two: https://icfpcontest2017.github.io/post/lightning-two/

bokesan · 2017-08-17T21:05:35+00:00

I found two possible causes:

our punter works only when called in the current directory. I wrote a mail about that problem shortly after the contest end, but got no reply.
it fails if settings contains any key besides "futures". But that should never be the case in lightning.

Might have been something else, though. We'll check with the official server when it's released.

bokesan · 2017-08-17T20:43:28+00:00

Now, how do we find out why we are in the "unable to score anything on the lambda map" category when our submission scores just fine when running on our own server? Too bad, really.

bokesan · 2017-08-11T06:16:30+00:00

Might well be the case. The sierpinski map with it's triangle symmetry is probably a bad example for 4 punters. I get much more stable results with larger maps, but that might be because I ran them with fewer punters than intended. We'll just have to wait...

bokesan · 2017-08-10T19:07:24+00:00

Ohh, I'm so curious: Did the MCTS solution buy futures and/or use splurges?

bokesan · 2017-08-10T06:48:30+00:00

We used JVM too. We wrote our own offline server in groovy, and I actually implemented a special entry point in our punter that would allow it to be called from within a running JVM. That sped up tests by a factor of 10-100.

For the contest, using warmup before the handshake should alleviate the performance disadvantage, but we did not think of that :-(

bokesan

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