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ICFP Contest 2004 Date Set

Posted by timothy on from the first-warning dept.

Bbazzarrakk writes "It's still a little ways off yet, but a date for the 2004 ICFP Programming Contest has been set. If you're like me, you need a little warning to plan for it and avoid missing it. The contest will begin Friday, June 4th at noon. For more information, keep an eye on The Official Contest Site."

17 comments

  1. it gotta say it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    that's probably the most informative link i've ever seen on slashdot. (click on it and see why i say that)

    1. Re:it gotta say it by manavendra · · Score: 1, Informative

      hehehe... for a moment I thought it was some sort of server error - till I actually read the page :-)

      --
      http://efil.blogspot.com/
  2. Nice page ! by manavendra · · Score: 1

    Clean and to the point :-p

    --
    http://efil.blogspot.com/
  3. What is it? by TwistedSquare · · Score: 0, Redundant

    So... after the useful subject and the useful web page, can anyone explain what this is and why it is significant?

  4. From ICFP Contest 2003 by df200 · · Score: 4, Informative
    From the website of last year's contest:
    Rules of the Game Is your favorite programming language the best? Does it lead to better and faster programs? Does it make programs easy to write and modify? Are you and your friends the best programmers in the world? Then prove it! All programmers are invited to enter the contest, either individually or in teams. The contest offers direct, head-to-head comparison of language technology and programming skill. We have a range of prizes for the winners: cash awards, books, invitations to the conference for students, and, of course, unlimited bragging rights. The prizes will be awarded at ICFP 2003 in Uppsala this August.
  5. ICFP by Nighttime · · Score: 3, Interesting

    International Conference on Functional Programming, in case you were wondering.

    Does the Functional Programming part of the name preclude using object-oriented languages I wonder?

    --
    I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
    1. Re:ICFP by bmac · · Score: 4, Informative

      Nope. Any prog lang is ok, but the executable must be able to run on their platform, which in the past was a variant of Linux, if I remember correctly.

      I think they are simply putting the functional langs up against all comers. The winners of the last couple of contests have been ocaml, (once again) if I remember correctly.

      Peace & Blessings,
      bmac

    2. Re:ICFP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No. Based on last years results it would seem that you should use C++, as it is the programming language of choice for discriminating hackers.

    3. Re:ICFP by PylonHead · · Score: 1

      No, as the anonymous poster points out, last year C++ won first and second place. OCaml did win in the lightning round (the contest lasts 3 days, the lightning round judges entries submitted on the first day).

      Last year, for the first time, they let you run your code on your own hardware, and simply submit the results. The winner ran his simple C++ algorithm on a farm of dual processor machines, and managed to brute force his way into first place.

      --
      # (/.);;
      - : float -> float -> float =
    4. Re:ICFP by mvw · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Last year, for the first time, they let you run your code on your own hardware, and simply submit the results. The winner ran his simple C++ algorithm on a farm of dual processor machines, and managed to brute force his way into first place.

      The problem of last year's contest was implementing the simulation of a formula one racing car.

      Then you had to determine a set of control commands (steer left, right, accelerate, break) to stear it through a racing track from start to finish, which depending on the geometry of track could be quite tricky.

      It is a bit sad that brute forcing gave the best results. I still believe using theory of optimal control would have been the way to go, on the other hand for the hairy track I don't know if that would work out.

      I was very surprised that the organizers chose that kind of problem. Using the functional programming languages forbid destructive updates, thus once a variable got a value bound to it, that sticks. On the other hand most of the mathematical algorithms I know make rather much use of destructive updates.

      Don't know yet, if I am still to stupid to see the way how to do numerics with a functional language or if these are not as well suited for such problems like C++ or FORTRAN.

      By not allowing destructive updates you keep all intermediate results of a computation. So you can't brute force as much, as with C++.

      This is rather strange, so I believe the organizers had some clever tricks in mind that not relied on brute forcing (like that theory of optimal control) and we participants were just too stupid to know. :-)

      Regards,
      Marc

      PS I submitted that item days before twice and got rejected, does anyone understand the editorial policy of Slashdot?

    5. Re:ICFP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Using the functional programming languages forbid destructive updates

      Thats not true, only lazy functional languages do that. You can have global references just fine in OCaml.

    6. Re:ICFP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "By not allowing destructive updates you keep all intermediate results of a computation."

      No you don't. You only keep the ones you're going to need later - most functional languages are garbage-collected. What does have an effect on performance is when you use a new memory cell instead of overwriting the old data in-place, but there are a lot of compiler optimisations that can help avoid that inefficieny.

      The majority of the most widely-used functional languages _do_ have destructive update, though, because they allow imperative programmers to gain some of the advantages of functional languages without having to learn a different approach to programming.

      -Greg Mildenhall

  6. summary of past contest results by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    First places in the main category since the contest began:

    1998: Cilk (parallel C)
    1999: OCaml
    2000: OCaml
    2001: Haskell
    2002: OCaml
    2003: C++

    All languages can participate, in fact very many do, but as you can see, a "dynamically-typed" (misnomer) language never took the first place in the main category. Common Lisp and Scheme never took any of the first 3 places.

  7. Re:summary of past contest results by mvw · · Score: 1

    Erlang (not strongly typed) won the Lightning division once, if I remember right.

  8. Look Again... by Bbazzarrakk · · Score: 1

    The page has been updated.

  9. For ICFP Contest Tips... by Bbazzarrakk · · Score: 1

    I also suggest Seven Lessons from the ICFP Programming Contest.