ICFP Contest Underway

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."

Re:Hackers are all robbers to management

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you shut the fuck up, you motherfucking moron? Huh?

International Conference on Functional Program

[j1m+5n0w]

The programming contest is part of icfp [luc.edu] (they usually announce the winner at the conference).

The name of the game is

[ciroknight]

Artifical Intellengence.

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

[ZombieChiefExecutive]

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.

I hear you. But there is so much more to life than games. I think... ;-)

Re:The name of the game is

[Ambush Commander]

and on par with games like Go.

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

[ciroknight]

Actually, I would expect them to have an animated game transcript. Last time I programmed in a challenge like this (GNU Robots in PHP basically), I built an ASCII library for all of the graphics processing.. of course this was pre-AJAX, so it wasn't nearly as good as it could have been..

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 ou

Re:The name of the game is

[Anonymous Coward]

It's often best practices to make a contest be a game programming contest;

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

Re:The name of the game is

[ciroknight]

The thing about a Game competition is, that it allows for so many different strategies, that anyone can come up with one, code it, bring it to life, and have a chance to win. Therefore, games make really good contests.

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

Re:Better game? Something other than a game?

[Anonymous Coward]

you are such a fucking liar. you wouldn't enter this contest ever, you just like to jerk off while reading slashdot. mental masturbation is not the same thing as being skilled

Re:ANY language?

[j1m+5n0w]

If you can provide binaries that run on vanilla Windows XP or Knoppix and are capable of reading from stdin and writing to stdout, then as far as I can tell, that would be fine.

Arimaa

[headkase]

Check out Arimaa [arimaa.com]. It's a game based on positional intelligence in stark contrast to brute force adaptive space searching that a chess engine uses. What is positional intelligence? Don't know, you gotta play it to learn it. But one thing that has been demonstrated so far is that a beginner human player has a good chance of beating the best computer player yet devised. And Arimaa has the same depth that is intrinsic within chess as well - your rating as a player ranges from novice to grandmaster. Positi

Re:Arimaa

[blogan]

Looking at the game it's only been out for less than three years. If the game was as popular as chess, than stating that there's no good computer program would hold a better argument that the game strategy is unique.

Mods...

[rbarreira]

Offtopic? Please...

Any Language?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoever enters a BrainFuck entry will be my personal hero.

[+++>>><<<---]

Re:Any Language?

[uchi]

Wow, that is some worthless brainfuck code you entered. It is all about befunge-98 anyways...

01&v-1: <
>2->::2`|
|:\0\_+v/
_$.@ ^\<<

More on the task

[spockvariant]

Participants need to write programs that control bots - cop bots and robber bots on a pre-defined map. The goal of the robber bots (of which there's only one in the first round) is to rob as many banks as possible (to rob a bank, a robber needs to simply arrive at its location), and that of the cop bots is to minimize the amount of money stolen - and if possible, catch the robber. The map can be seen as a directed graph with various edge attributes that decide how fast and in what direction a particular bot can move.

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.

Oh, great

[Rick and Roll]

Now people have a place to meet to break all the contest rules.

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.

I need more sleep.

[Mr. Bad Example]

I kept reading this as "Insane Clown FORTRAN Posse".

I like the "create this" part..

[dbcad7]

I like the "create this" part.. but the time pressure too much for my basic (literaly) skills.

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 r

Re:I like the "create this" part..

[Fahrenheit 450]

Well, if you're willing to limit yourself to C, C++, Java, or Pascal, you may want to have a look at some of the problems available at The Online Jodge [online-judge.uva.es]. You can code them up and submit them to have them tested for speed and correctness.

Evolved algorithms

[-Harlequin-]

This seems like a suitable challenge to grow your program using mutation & selection and/or crossbreeding methods to create an evolved solution instead of a designed one. Set it up now, and leave some simulations running on a dedicated box or six, 24/7 until the competition. Then take your killer software to the competition.

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

[rbarreira]

This reminds of that somewhat-well-known story which Skiena tells in one of his books.

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 concl

Re:Evolved algorithms

[swiftstream]

My brother in law worked with a professor at Stanford Unviersity (Koza or something...) who worked with mutating computer programs and the like. At one point his computers designed a circuit which always returned the cube of the number inputted, but he couldnt figure out why.

So, not so far-fetched, after all.

knee deep in garbage

[epine]

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 funda

Re:knee deep in garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently, functional languages can solve every real world problem with ease

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 compli

Re:knee deep in garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

That depends highly on the particular program and garbage collector, and probably isn't true in the general case. But in any event, there was a really good paper [umass.edu] at this year's PLDI about how to make garbage collectors avoid paging that's well worth reading.

Re:knee deep in garbage

[Reverend528]

...the advantages of LISP and related languages citing garbage collection as one of the pillars of post-C language design

LISP really can't be categorized as a post-C language, as it was created roughly 15 years before C.