ICFP Programming Contest

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The ICFP Programming Contest is an international programming competition held annually since 1998, with results announced at the International Conference on Functional Programming.

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". As such, one of the competition's goals is to showcase the capabilities of the contestants' favourite programming languages and tools. Previous first prize winners have used Haskell, Objective Caml, C++ and Cilk.

1 Past tasks
2 Prizes
3 References and notes
4 Perennial Teams
5 External links

[edit] Past tasks

Year	Organiser	Description
1998	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	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.
1999	Harvard University	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).
2000	Cornell University	implement a ray tracer using a Postscript-like syntax.
2001	INRIA Rocquencourt	size-optimize an HTML-like markup language by removing unnecessary whitespace and tags, and so on.
2002	OGI School of Science and Engineering	implement robots playing a Sokoban-like game one against each other.
2003	Chalmers University	implement robots driving a car as fast as possible through different racing tracks.
2004	University of Pennsylvania	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. Later the task was adapted into Ant Wars, a strategy and programming game where each participant is a species of ant. The participant then, in a language called Antomata,^[1] program a finite state machine to function as the brain of each ant. The ant brain then control the ant to find and collect food to bring to the home ant hill, to fend off attackers or making trails of pheromones.
2005	PLT group	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.
2006	Carnegie Mellon University	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. Many puzzles were tiny versions or parodies of previous contests.
2007	Utrecht University	implement a 2-stage virtual machine that executes a DNA-like string to produce an image. Then, given an input string for this machine, find a prefix that when added to this string yields an image as close as possible to the given target image.

[edit] Prizes

Prizes have a modest cash value, primarily aimed at helping the winners to attend the conference, where the prizes are awarded and the judges make the following declarations:

First prize: [Language 1] is the programming tool of choice for discriminating hackers.
Second prize: [Language 2] is a fine programming tool for many applications.
Third prize: [Language 3] is also not too shabby.
Winner of the lightning division: [Language L] is very suitable for rapid prototyping.
Judges' prize: [Team X] are an extremely cool bunch of hackers.

Where a winning entry involves several languages, the winners are asked to nominate one or two. The languages named in the judges' declarations have been:

Year	First Prize	Second Prize	Third Prize	Lightning
1998	Cilk	OCaml
1999	OCaml	Haskell		^[2]
2000	OCaml	OCaml
2001	Haskell	Dylan
2002	OCaml	C		^[2]
2003	C++	C++		OCaml
2004	Haskell	Haskell and C++		Java and C++
2005	Haskell	Dylan	Haskell
2006	2D^[3]	D	Assembly
2007	C++	Perl		^[4]

[edit] References and notes

^ Antomata - The Language of Ant Wars
^ ^a ^b The contests in 1999 and 2002 had a lightning division, but without a separate prize. The winners of that division were awarded Judges' prizes.
^ 2D was a toy language invented for the 2006 contest. The winning team used C++, Haskell, Python, Bash, 2D and a private Google language.
^ The 2007 contest had a lightning division, but since there was no clear leader after 24 hours the judges decided not to choose a winner.