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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."
I wonder how many job offers 1st place winner and UT undergrad Andrew Hudson is going to receive... or for you conspiracy folks out there, how many shadowy organizations he'll be "invited" to join.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
Its nice to see my two favorite languages take the top spots :) Its also pretty nifty that the Gwydion Dylan team got another prize. They got second place a couple of years ago too. Anyway, more people need to check out Dylan. Its a pretty nifty language. It was made by Apple in the early 1990's, by a committe containing a lot of important Lisp people. As a result, its kind of an object-oriented Lisp with a more traditional syntax. Its a very powerful language, but also very fast. It was designed to achieve 90% the performance of C. In practice, the current Gwydion compiler (designed by the same group at CMU that did CMUCL) achieves 50-90% given similar code.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Congratulations! I've usually steered clear of checking out programming "challenges" because they usually seem to be focused on producing the most unreadable or obscure code to confuse the judges.
While you can learn things from obfuscated code, I think these practical challenges are a lot better for the programming community as a whole.
Finding optimal paths around race tracks and obstacles presents a number of challenges which when solved in multiple totally different ways, helps give us new theories and data which we can use to develop new algorithms and theories for use in the real world.
Can anyone recommend any other programming challenges which focus on developing new algorithms which may be useful in other disciplines?
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^
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