Friday, May 6, 2011

Contest announcement

The ICFP Programming Contest 2011 is the 14th instance of the annual programming contest series sponsored by The ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming.  This year, the contest starts at  00:00 June 17 Friday UTC (= 24:00 June 16 Thursday UTC) and ends at 00:00 June 20 Monday UTC (= 24:00 June 19 Sunday UTC).   Unlike in previous years, there is no 24-hour lightning division.

The task description will be published in this blog when the contest starts.  Solutions to the task must be submitted online before the contest ends.  Details of the submission procedure will be announced along with the contest task.

This is an open contest.  Anybody may participate except for the contest organizers and members of the same laboratory as the the contest chair's.  No advance registration or entry fee is required.

Participants may form teams.  A team consists of every person who contributes ideas and/or code towards a submission.  Teams may have any number of members.  Individuals may only be members of a single team and teams may not divide or collaborate with each other once the contest has begun.

Any programming language(s) may be used as long as the submitted program can be run by the judges on a standard Linux environment with no network connection.  Details of the judges' environment will be announced later.

There will be prizes for the first (US$1,000) and second ($500) place teams as well as a discretionary judges' prize ($500).  There will also be a total of $6,000 travel support.  (The prizes and travel support are subject to the budget plan of ICFP 2011 pending approval by ACM.)

In addition, the organizers will declare during the conference that:
  • the first place team's language is "the programming language of choice for discriminating hackers",
  • the second place team's language is "a fine tool for many applications", and
  • the team winning the judges' prize is "an extremely cool bunch of hackers".

Additional announcements about the contest will be made at http://www.icfpcontest.org/.  Questions can be posted as comments to the blog or e-mailed to icfpc2011-blogger AT kb.ecei.tohoku.ac.jp (please replace AT with @).

We look forward to your participation!

The contest organizers: Hidehiko Abe, Yumi Arai, Kenichi Asai (observer), Noriko Hirota, Atsushi Igarashi (observer), Kazuhiro Inaba, Arisa Iwai, Chihiro Kaneko, Shinya Kawanaka, Moe Masuko, Yasuhiko Minamide (observer), Ryosuke Sato, Yu Shibata, Yu Sugawara, Takeshi Tsukada, Kanae Tsushima, Yayoi Ueda, and Eijiro Sumii (chair).

16 comments:

  1. >> standard Linux environment

    Does that happen to include the JVM or Mono runtime?

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  2. As mentioned above, we will announce the details of our environment later (as soon as possible, but not _so_ soon!:-).

    We plan to support as many major (and not so major) languages/runtimes as possible.

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  3. A virtual machine --e.g., one that can run in VirtualBox-- would be helpful. On the other hand, once we know the details it would be easy for anyone to create a VM and make it available for download...

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  4. So you choose not to support the newest industrial functional language: F#. Typical academia...

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  5. Would it be possible to request a certain runtime environment? I would like to compete using APLX.

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  6. > A virtual machine --e.g., one that can run in VirtualBox-- would be helpful.

    Yes.

    > On the other hand, once we know the details it would be easy for anyone to create a VM and make it available for download...

    Yes. It would also be easy for anyone to create a VM for oneself.

    > So you choose not to support the newest industrial functional language: F#.

    F# also runs on Linux, does it not???

    > Would it be possible to request a certain runtime environment? I would like to compete using APLX.

    Perhaps, but even if a particular runtime is not pre-installed, you should be able to submit it together with your own program.

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  7. What type of programming problems are to be solved in this contest? Can someone just give an overview to get a general idea about the contest?

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  8. Please look at previous years' contest sites: http://www.icfpcontest.org/2011/03/links-to-previous-contests.html

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  9. Does anyone know if the 2010 contest scoreboard can be found anywhere online? The Internet Archive doesn't have it. The last known URL is:
    http://www.icfpcontest.org/icfp10/score/teamAll

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  10. Unfortunately, the present organizers have no additional information about previous contests other than the links (http://www.icfpcontest.org/2011/03/links-to-previous-contests.html). Please try to find and contact the contest chair of that time.

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  11. You wrote that "there is no 24-hour lightning division." Is this because the contest task is too difficult to solve (at least in an initial version) in one day? Background: I probably will only be able to take part during the first 24 hours...

    Or is there another reason?

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  12. It is just for organizational reasons. We hope you can still enjoy the contest in the first 24 hours.

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  13. You might include pylint.

    I'm a little disappointed that Squeeze doesn't appear to include a PyPy package. Then again, although PyPy tends to be fast, it's a bit memory hungry.

    Including Cython might be a good idea.

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  14. Please be specific whether you are requesting us to install those packages or not (instead of writing "might include" or "a good idea"). If so, please comment to
    http://www.icfpcontest.org/2011/05/judges-machine-and-system-environment.html
    (not this entry) as announced.

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  15. Does C++0x count? It's working on Linux with gcc4.6 and you can program functional with it.

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  16. Of course! It does not matter whether your language supports functional programming or the compiler is available on our environment. The announcement above says:

    > Any programming language(s) may be used as long as the submitted program can be run by the judges on a standard Linux environment with no network connection.

    Please also read another announcement:

    http://www.icfpcontest.org/2011/05/judges-machine-and-system-environment.html

    > Source code of your program must also be submitted, though it will not be compiled by the judges

    See also what languages have won previous contests:

    http://www.icfpcontest.org/2011/03/links-to-previous-contests.html

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICFP_Programming_Contest

    Thanks!

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