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ICFP 2003 Programming Contest Results
An anonymous reader writes "The previously reported ICFP Contest has been over for quite some time. The results were announced on August 26, 2003 at the conference in Uppsala, Sweden, yet the contest organizers have yet to publish results. Despite the forgetfulness of the organizers, it is known that this year C++ did well, taking first and second, but not judge's prize. Interestingly, a one-man team consisting of an undergraduate student took first place, followed by a team of highly ranked 'red' TopCoders, with the maintainers of Gwydion Dylan taking judge's prize."
from: http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=688 44&cid=6294481
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ICFP stands for International Conference on Functional Programming. Neither the /. story nor the contest website make this clear
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This contest concerned virtual racing tracks. The winner was the one who submitted the trace which would pilot the car as fast as possible around the track. (See the problem description for more information.)
Thus the judges never ran the program on their computers, and in theory could have judged the contest without even looking at source code. To me this seems a bit unfair because the winner could just be the one with the fastest computer, not the best code. I noticed that the first prize team used 16 dual Xeons.
So did anyone here compete? In practice are the results greatly influenced by how much hardware the contestants had access to?
Take a look at the topcoder.com site. It's a periodic competition with short round matches that take a little over an hour to complete 3 challenges. These challenges are similiar to ACM competitions, but quite a bit easier b/c of the time limitations. The rankings are given in points kind of like chess, and the highest ranked coders are color-coded red. Below that is yellow and so on. Thus the best coders are 'Red coders'.
Values taken from the ICFP 2002 webpage and munged with an awk script... not 100% accurate, but close enough.
language entries
java 28
c 24
c++ 22
caml 19
python 15
perl 11
scheme 7
haskell 6
lisp 5
dylan 2
erlang 2
mercury 2
pltbot 2
ruby 2
ada 1
bot! 1
dogs 1
extensions 1
forth 1
icon 1
kylix 1
lspm 1
mhotas 1
pandemonium 1
pps 1
prolog 1
sk 1
smalltalk 1
sml 1
v202 1
Some languages are bogus because of the format of the author's entry, or they used multiple languages.
I've been participating in TC's programming contests for more than a year. There are weekly contests, each of which take only about 90 minutes of your time. There are no prizes given out for the regular contests any more, but I really enjoy being able to get a nice mental workout, and compare myself to some really elite programmers. Most of the top-ranked coders have done extremely well in other prestigious international math and programming contests. And even if you aren't at the level of the top ranked guys (mostly - I think the highest ranked woman is around 50th or so, it would be nice to see more female participation), it can still be fun to work on improving your rating and other statistics such as submission accuracy. The rating system is modelled after the FIDE system for rating chess players.
There are many other reasons to participate. You can also learn a lot by looking at the submissions by the top ranked coders. If you're looking for a job and do reasonably well, there's a good chance one of the many sponsor companies will be interested in hiring you. And perhaps most of all, TC has two big tournaments each year - the open, and the college invitational. These tournaments usually have a total prize purse of $100,000 or more, and pay out $50,000 or more to the winner.
Finally, to answer your question; the TC ratings brackets are split up into different colours. 'Red' is the highest bracket, and includes anyone with a rating higher than 2199. This corresponds to roughly the top 2% of all rated members.
International Conference on Functional Programming.
Just in case anyone wants to know without clicking through the fifth link to find a page that actually tells you...
Your comparision is not quite correct.
... who knows? Scheme is that easy to parse, that the questin makes no real sense to me. It only looks more beautyfull if you find scheme beautyfull ... wich I don't :-)
FP is all about making algorithms primary and data secondary.
In FP, functions *ARE* data. The main way to distinguish programming languages, or programming paradigms, is by looking at the question: what are the so called "first class citicens?" (fcc)
In "procedureal" languages the fcc's are *NOT* "procedures", its only called procedural because the main "structuring" feature at that time was the procedure.
Functional languages are best set in relation to oo languages (or oo-like languages like Java and hybrids like C++). The most heavyly used fcc's in oo languages are objects. Thats what you create and what you pass around. E.G.: you create an object and pass it via a call to an algorithm.
In functional languages, the things you create are: functions, not objects, not structs. the things you pass around are functions, you *apply* a funcion on some data.
In both cases you still have data, and still you have algorithms.
What makes fuctional languages "inefficient" in some respects is the fact that they in general do not manipulate "state" of some data, but consider data to be read-only and yield an result instead. Suppose the whole kernal memory is the state of a system, a functional "kernal" would compute a complete new kernal state as a value object.
OTOH: functional languages are inherently multi threaded, as they only read access unchangeable data.
Regarding your - hypotetical - question wether a scheme parser written in scheme would be easyer than a standard C/Pascal parser
BTW: its is often very difficult to express algorithms in a pure-functional manner that have the same asymptotic complexity as their imperitive counterparts
This makes no sense to me, either. The asymptotic complexity of a problem has no relation to the programming paradigm you use -- only to your skills in that paradigm.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The only example I can think of is the many "robot" fighting challenges, where you write a program for a robot, and it has to destroy the other robots within the battlefield using its own "wits" and no human input. You might remember PC-ROBOTS from the early 90's if you're a real geek ^v^
It sounds like you are making reference to robocode, but it's hard to tell since you mention PCRobots. If you weren't, well then you might want to check it out.