POTM Contest Lives Again

bababooey182 writes "The Programmer of the Month (POTM) contest series has returned. POTM was a fantastic programming contest series that ran from 1993 to 2000, and participants were greatly disappointed when it ended. Fred Hicinbothem, the brains and personality behind the POTM, brought it back a few months ago, and the POTM has the same community feel that it did back in the day. Here's to another long run. The current contest deadline is November 30th."

Comments

Awesome!

[comwiz56]

This sounds exciting. While I wasn't a part of this when it was around back before '00, I'm definately going to get involved. This is a nice competition that supports friendly competetion between programmers, and gives them plenty of freedom to choose which language they use.

Ironically

[xenocide2]

I wrote a program for a software engineering course to handle exactly that. In fact, we designed some ways to improve the system through communications. I could liberate the code and have a finished product in a few days, but the communication code would be a difficult migration from encouraged cooperation to discouraged as cheating.

Likely, the part two contest will degrade into a greedy algorithm made distributed; a few smart cookies might decide to avoid overly contested nuts. Any more sophisticated algorithms rely on rational or at least predictable behavior from other contestants.

As an example, there's a nut that you're the closest to, and also another nut you're tied for closest to. Taking one means you'll lose distance on the other. You might think, take the closest one, but if everyone thinks that, then that nut is likely off limits. Its hard to tell traditional gridworld AI techniques where to draw the line between securing what's theoretically yours to take and contesting a resource with a competitor. In theory, you should be competing with the opponent in the lead, but I doubt many squirrels will be that advanced.

Re:Ironically

[DrEasy]

You made some very good points. At first glance, my impression is that part one is really the travelling salesman problem, so some kind of branch-and-bound might do a good job, which you could initialize with a greedy algorithm to get a good upper bound.

You could then just reuse your greedy for part two, but your observation that you need to take into account the other squirrels is correct. Maybe you could just modify your greedy to get you to the first nut that is closest to you than to any other squirrel (as opposed to just the closest nut), but there won't always be such a thing... Hmmm...

Wish I had time to participate in this, it sounds fun.