ICFP Contest Underway 43
iseff writes "The ICFP Contest (reported first here) is now underway. There's probably still some time for us slackers to code up something for the first round. This year's problem is similar to the board game Cops and Robbers. What I find cool about this year is the split into two parts -- code the original spec, then wait, get a new spec, and modify. Plus, any language is accepted, even though it's a 'functional programming' contest."
Hackers are all robbers to management (Score:-1, Redundant)
Re:Hackers are all robbers to management (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Hackers are all robbers to management (Score:0)
Better game? Something other than a game? (Score:-1, Flamebait)
Re:Better game? Something other than a game? (Score:0)
International Conference on Functional Program (Score:2)
The name of the game is (Score:5, Interesting)
It's often best practices to make a contest be a game programming contest; people like games. People like to code interesting projects. Luckily this puts them together.
Before you pass it off as "too simplistic" or not "deeper", that game probably has well over 10^30 different possible configurations, easily defeating similar games like Chess, and on par with games like Go.
These are the kinds of things that really bring out the talented coders.. people who can design the algorithms, people who can figure out the internals of the game, and not just the coders who write code for a living. I can't wait to see the results; I'd work on it myself if I could.
Re:The name of the game is (Score:1)
I hear you. But there is so much more to life than games. I think... ;-)
Re:The name of the game is (Score:1)
Then we must worry about the game being too hard [wikipedia.org]. Fortunantely, it'll be hard for everyone, but perhaps that's why we won't be seeing animated game transcripts (although that'd be really cool).
Re:The name of the game is (Score:2)
And yes, the game is actually too hard. That's the whole point; it's a fair game. Nobody's going to have any chance better than anyone else unless they design their algorithms correctly. That takes all of the guesswork out of the game, and ensures the playing field is fair. It also adds a lot of variability to the game, allowing for a huge amount of possible attacks at the game.
Re:The name of the game is (Score:1, Insightful)
Actually it's not. The problem with multiplayer game simulations is that the best strategy will depend on what other bots are doing. Even if you write a very complicated program that detects what strategies the other bots are following and has a large number of strategies coded as possible responses (which is far more effort than most entrants will make), there will still sometimes be no winning strategy against certain groups of bots, so all your extra effort goes to waste and someone with a trivial strategy wins.
If you absolutely must run a contest on a game, use these rules:
1) two players at a time only.
2) run many iterations.
3) consult a game theorist about your ideas.
Re:The name of the game is (Score:2)
Of course any game competiton will run many different iterations due to the fact that so many things either have to be randomly generated, and the bots my behave differently in different environments.
The thing is, if this was a program to do database sorting, nobody would care (or anything else randomly that can pop off your head; let's face facts that most programming tasks suck. That's why we're writing the damned program in the first place, so that someone doesn't have to do it by hand!!!). So really, it is best practices to make a competition a gaming competition.
These particular rule sets, I'm not very happy with, but that's personal reasoning. And any game theorist will tell you that anyone's got a fair shot at this; the search space is so great that nobody will have any marvolous breakthroughs, and it's more of a game of chance. And everyone knows contests of chance are more fun (Texas Holdem anyone?)
Re:The name of the game is (Score:0)
I'd prefer the person who successfully implemented the best strategy to win, not "anyone." That's the problem here, there's no guarantee that the best program or programmer will win.
The thing is, if this was a program to do database sorting, nobody would care (or anything else randomly that can pop off your head; let's face facts that most programming tasks suck. That's why we're writing the damned program in the first place, so that someone doesn't have to do it by hand!!!). So really, it is best practices to make a competition a gaming competition.
A programming competition can be fun without the problem being to implement a game. Plenty of previous ICFPs were not games and they were fun.
Seriously, it's cute and all to have a programming competition where you write code to play a game, but it's not the best way to do it.
Re:Better game? Something other than a game? (Score:1, Interesting)
I Have Found A Flaw In The Program Specification.. (Score:0)
Re:I Have Found A Flaw In The Program Specificatio (Score:0)
ANY language? (Score:-1, Redundant)
Re:ANY language? (Score:2)
Sounds fun (Score:0, Offtopic)
Arimaa (Score:2)
Re:Arimaa (Score:1)
Mods... (Score:2)
Any Language? (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Any Language? (Score:1)
01&v-1: <
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Re:Any Language? (Score:0)
More on the task (Score:5, Informative)
What is really interesting though, is the format in which the tournament is going to be played. Every game will consist of 5 cop bots going against 1 robber bot. The cop bots will be written by individual participants - and will have the capability to communicate with each other, suggesting 'plans', and voting on them to elect the best one. The whole team gets rewarded if the robber is caught, but you also get individual bonuses for individual achievements. This adds a byzantine-generals like dimension to the problem, since the strategy is always a mix between cooperative effort and individual greed.
The last and most important twist is the fact that the second round is worth 'significantly' more than the first, and involves adapting your bots to a modified version of the problem. What this modified version will be is a closely guarded secret... but it means that it's probably a good idea to spend as much time thinking about the design as thinking about the strategy.
ICFP (Score:-1, Offtopic)
Oh, great (Score:3, Interesting)
I am working on this as a solo programmer. I'm more into math and algorithms than the average state university C. S. graduate, but still not very good at math. So I don't expect to have a very great entry, but will enter anyway. It would be really nice to make it into the playoffs (you compete against mediocre judge's robots in the regular season, and have to beat them to get into the playoffs). I think I'll be lucky if any AI I add doesn't break the protocol code (disqualifying my robot).
I'm going to work into the wee hours of the morning both tonight and tomorrow night (I am in Arizona, so the contest started at 7:00 AM Friday and ends at 7:00AM Monday). I'll see what I get. If nothing else it will be a good learning experience - in fact it already has been good.
I've been following the mailing list. The most interesting devlopment was that someone discovered that the five cops could camp the six banks, because two banks were only separated by one intersection. The organizers released a new map to fix this.
It's an exciting contest.
Re:Oh, great (Score:0)
I need more sleep. (Score:1, Offtopic)
Hey, that's my old stomping grounds! (Score:0, Offtopic)
(Hrmm. No, now that I think of it, that corner has a Starbucks [what corner doesn't?], a church, a school, and some nasty-looking apartments. The fire station is one block west. Ohwell, this is supposed to be the fictional future hyper-advanced year 2000 Chicago, maybe there'll be some changes by then...)
mod do3n (Score:-1, Troll)
Tubgi8L (Score:-1, Redundant)
I like the "create this" part.. (Score:1)
I learned basic many moons ago (apple IIC if you want to calculate that), and other than a little python recently, I haven't done much coding. I find as an individual not doing it for a living, programming gets to the point where you say.. ok I can do this, but now what do I do ?
A few years back, I had a freind who wanted a program to mactch up roosters for fighting, It had the following requirements...
must randomly match
must match within 2 ozs
each participant had 2 entries, must not match into same "owner"
avoid matching 2 owners against each other twice if possible
Altough probably simple for most of you hard core coders, it was a challange for me, and I did it in qbasic.. my reason for bringing this up is that if I had other challenges like this, I probably would have kept at it more. I like the idea behind contests like these.. perhaps I will try to do this challenge just for my own fun and not part of the competition.
Re:I like the "create this" part.. (Score:1)
Evolved algorithms (Score:3, Interesting)
The coolest bit would be when anyone asks "So, how does your program work?", to which you would answer "I haven't the faintest idea. It just does."
Re:Evolved algorithms (Score:2)
The story's about neural networks, it tells about a military system which had a neural network program which was supposed to be able to distinguish between images of tanks and images of regular cars. They trained the network with their trainining input sets, and after some training, it was working for those.
When they started using the system in real life, it was a complete disaster... After some investigation, they concluded that the pictures they used to train the network were the guilty party - the car pictures were all taken on a rainy day, and the tank pictures were all taken on a sunny day. Conclusion - the network was distinguishing between cars and tanks based on the light present in the scene
Re:Evolved algorithms (Score:2)
So, not so far-fetched, after all.
knee deep in garbage (Score:2)
In the original thread there were posts about the advantages of LISP and related languages citing garbage collection as one of the pillars of post-C language design.
Now, I find this amazing. Apparently, functional languages can solve every real world problem with ease except keeping track of what resources have been allocated and their necessary life scope. Why do such potent language frameworks punt this problem to a simplifying heuristic? Are problems that arise in the implementation domain of a fundamentally greater complexity than problems that arise anywhere else?
Re:knee deep in garbage (Score:1, Informative)
This is a straw man. Nobody claims this apart from the zealots, and they can be ignored like all other fanatics.
What serious FP users claim is that FP can solve many classes of real-world problem with greater ease than existing imperative languages.
There is some truth to this claim. Many OO design patterns have far simpler equivalents in FP languages. The visitor pattern, for example, is nothing more than an extremely complicated, tedious, and inefficient substitute for pattern matching on algebraic datatypes. FP languages are highly optimised for tree processing, making them ideal for any application that uses XML.
There are also problems which FP does not make any easier; for example, simple text processing applications are typically much more complicated to write in FP languages than in specialised scripting languages like Perl or Ruby, while event-driven GUIs are a problem ideally suited to an OO approach, which is another weak point of FP languages (though there are FP/OO hybrids like OCaml and Lisp's CLOS which go some way to dealing with this problem).
If you're interested in seeing what FP has to offer imperative/OO developers, just look at the Boost libraries for C++. Many of the ideas there, like closures and lazy lists, have been drawn from FP research. Sounds like someone thinks FP is interesting enough to be worth serious effort bending a non-FP language to support it.
The garbage collector is a solution to that problem. In the presence of dynamic scoping, it is the only general solution that has been discovered so far. The only method of memory management that provides superior speed and efficiency is static allocation on the stack, and that is a great restriction that makes programming considerably more difficult.
What exactly is your problem with GC? It removes a major source of bugs and decreases the complexity of a program considerably, without introducing any major disadvantages. So why are you so hostile to it?
Re:knee deep in garbage (Score:0)
Re:knee deep in garbage (Score:1, Informative)
Re:knee deep in garbage (Score:2, Informative)
LISP really can't be categorized as a post-C language, as it was created roughly 15 years before C.