POTM Contest Lives Again

bababooey182 writes "The Programmer of the Month (POTM) contest series has returned. POTM was a fantastic programming contest series that ran from 1993 to 2000, and participants were greatly disappointed when it ended. Fred Hicinbothem, the brains and personality behind the POTM, brought it back a few months ago, and the POTM has the same community feel that it did back in the day. Here's to another long run. The current contest deadline is November 30th."

So no VB huh?

[AndroidCat]

Current languages include C, C++, Perl, Python, PHP, Shells, and a few other non-compiled interpreters - the resources link will tell you what you need to know about the programming environment.

From the resources link, better check to make sure everything you think you need is available in the sandbox.

Re:So no VB huh?

[comwiz56]

This is most likely running on a linux box (the paths confirm that assumption)... So that throws VB completely out of the question. I'd also dare to say that most of the programmers that would attempt this (and be succesful) wouldn't be the types to use VB anyways.

Re:So no VB huh?

[AndroidCat]

I forgot the smiley after VB. :) It's definitely a Linux box, and the resources [dinsights.com] link makes it pretty clear that it's a specific configuration. Since this is an algorithm battle, the particular language isn't too important. (Athough I'm surprised Java wasn't on the list. Hmm, a LISP squirrel?)

Not much warning however: Deadline for NUTS is November 30th, 2004. I think I'll wait for the next one.

Awesome!

[comwiz56]

This sounds exciting. While I wasn't a part of this when it was around back before '00, I'm definately going to get involved. This is a nice competition that supports friendly competetion between programmers, and gives them plenty of freedom to choose which language they use.

Let's Take A Crack At This

[Rie Beam]

"The current contest requires you to program a squirrel to collect nuts."

One of the problems with the current programming community is that people love to reinvent the wheel...for instance, I have seen many a squirrel, and to the best of my knowledge, they need no upgrade as far as nut-finding is concerned. Now, lasers, maybe.

zerg

[Lord Omlette]

Despite the fact that it's not a front page post, I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that this is the second time in a row that Slashdot editors posted a story about a contest before the contest was over!

Happy doesn't begin to describe my mood. ^^v

Ironically

[xenocide2]

I wrote a program for a software engineering course to handle exactly that. In fact, we designed some ways to improve the system through communications. I could liberate the code and have a finished product in a few days, but the communication code would be a difficult migration from encouraged cooperation to discouraged as cheating.

Likely, the part two contest will degrade into a greedy algorithm made distributed; a few smart cookies might decide to avoid overly contested nuts. Any more sophisticated algorithms rely on rational or at least predictable behavior from other contestants.

As an example, there's a nut that you're the closest to, and also another nut you're tied for closest to. Taking one means you'll lose distance on the other. You might think, take the closest one, but if everyone thinks that, then that nut is likely off limits. Its hard to tell traditional gridworld AI techniques where to draw the line between securing what's theoretically yours to take and contesting a resource with a competitor. In theory, you should be competing with the opponent in the lead, but I doubt many squirrels will be that advanced.

Re:Ironically

[DrEasy]

You made some very good points. At first glance, my impression is that part one is really the travelling salesman problem, so some kind of branch-and-bound might do a good job, which you could initialize with a greedy algorithm to get a good upper bound.

You could then just reuse your greedy for part two, but your observation that you need to take into account the other squirrels is correct. Maybe you could just modify your greedy to get you to the first nut that is closest to you than to any other squirrel (as opposed to just the closest nut), but there won't always be such a thing... Hmmm...

Wish I had time to participate in this, it sounds fun.

Re:Ironically

[plupster]

I need a project for my advanced functional programming course. (We are supposed to create an domain specific embedded language for Haskell and program something "usefull" in it.) I was thinking about creating an language to write IRC-bots in but maybe I'll create a squirrel programming language instead. Then it would be simple to test some different tactics.

Welcome to all from the POTM-MASTER!

[POTM-MASTER]

I appreciate the posting ... regret that I can't support VB/Java ... and encourage everyone to come and visit the new home of the POTM at http://dinsights.com/POTM ...

Even if you aren't quick enough to code up a squirrel by next week (a not-so-veiled challenge of course) I hope you'll join the mailing list so you'll get a heads-up on the next problem.

There are no hidden motivations here - the goal is to have fun with others who think coding is fun.
Some have spent long hours on their entries, and others ha