ICFP Programming Contest

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The ICFP Programming Contest is an annual international programming competition associated with the International Conference on Functional Programming. The first was held in 1998.

Teams may be of any size and any programming language(s) may be used. There is also no entry fee. Participants have 72 hours to complete and submit their entry over the Internet. There is often also a 24-hour lightning division.

The winners reserve "bragging rights" to claim that their language is "the programming tool of choice for discriminating hackers". Previous first prize winners have used Haskell, Objective Caml, Dylan, Cilk and C++.


[edit] Past tasks

  • 1998: write a program that plays pousse, an odd variant of tic-tac-toe. Contestant programs were entered into a tournament to determine the first- and second-place program. Winner language: Cilk.
  • 1999: size-optimize case statements (the contest task spoke about text-based adventure games, but in fact the task was to size-optimize the description of such a game). Winner language: Objective Caml.
  • 2000: implement a ray tracer using a Postscript-like syntax. Winner language: Objective Caml.
  • 2001: size-optimize an HTML-like markup language by removing unnecessary whitespace and tags, and so on. Winner language: Haskell.
  • 2002: implement robots playing a Sokoban-like game one against each other. Winner language: Objective Caml.
  • 2003: implement robots driving a car as fast as possible through different racing tracks. Judges' Prize Language: Dylan. First Prize Language: C++
  • 2004: design an ant colony that will bring the most food particles back to its anthill, while fending off ants of another species. The contest entry would output a state-machine description of the ant: in principle, entries could have been written by hand. Judges' Prize Language: Objective Caml. First Prize Language: Haskell.
  • 2005: implement "bots" for a "Cops & Robbers" game: contestants have to write the control program that guides a Robber-Bot through a quiet urban neighborhood on a mission to rob every bank without getting caught, and the control program for a Cop-Bot dedicated to stopping it. Judges' Prize Language: Dylan. First Prize Language: Haskell.
  • 2006: implement a virtual machine that runs an operating system (called UMIX) provided by the judges, and crack it using new programming languages with unconventional syntax and semantics, such as 2D and a version of BASIC using roman numerals.

[edit] Prizes

Judges' results are usually in the following format:

  • First prize goes to [Team 1]. The judges are happy to proclaim that [Language 1] is the programming tool of choice for discriminating hackers.
  • Second prize goes to [Team 2]. The judges are happy to proclaim that [Language 2] is a fine programming tool for many applications.
  • Third prize goes to [Team 3]. The judges are happy to proclaim that [Language 3] is also not too shabby.
  • The judges' prize goes to [Team X]. The judges are happy to proclaim that the [Team X] are an extremely cool bunch of hackers.
  • The lightning prize goes to [Team L]. The judges are happy to proclaim that the [Language L] is very suitable for rapid prototyping.

[edit] External links

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