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Results

After hours of judging, the judges declare that:

• First prize goes to team Supermassive Black Hom-set:
  • Haskell is the programming language of choice for discriminating hackers!
• Second prize goes to team UnaGi:
  • C++ is a fine programming tool for many applications
• Third prize goes to team DiamondPrincess:
  • Perl is also not too shabby
• The winner of the lightning round is team jabber.ru:
  • OCaml is very suitable for rapid prototyping
• The judge’s prize goes to team gagallium Team gagallium are an extremely cool bunch of hackers!

For more details, see the results page, or view the video of the announcment made at ICFP.

GAME OVER!

Good news! Amongst the dusty archives we found the original technical report that must have inspired the design of the quirky Lambda-Man CPU. You can find a scan of this report online. So the Lambda-Man CPU turns out to be a hardware implementation of the SECD machine. We did wonder why the CPU registers were called %s %e %c and %d!

We will be announcing the final results (aka HALL OF FAME) of the competition at ICFP (Gothenburg, Sweden; September 1–3, 2014). We will then publish the final rankings including the team home pages you supplied.

In the meantime we encourage you to publish your solutions and write-ups, and submit links to them on the icfpcontest subreddit.

We also plan to open source our reference implementation and the HALL OF FAME server code after the results have been announced. The judges decisions (including quirks and bugs in our implementation) are final.

News

• The competition has now been judged. We have contacted the winners: the formal announcment will be made at ICFP. Thanks to all contestants for their participation!
• GAME OVER!
• The full round is nearly over! Time to get your submission in! Remember, you can update your submission up until the final deadline.
• The HALL OF FAME now has some new maps, an easy and one hard one. I ain’t afraid of no ghosts!
• Wow! You can now enter the HALL OF FAME by submitting your Lambda-Man AIs! (no longer accepting entries)
• [Sunday 27th 13:45 UTC] We have updated the reference implementation to correct a subtle bug in the mechanics, so it should now be correct with respect to the specification.
• Great news, we’ve uncovered more dusty ’80s documents and have more fun for you! See the additional task specification for the full round. This is a supplement to the existing base specification.
• The lightning round is nearly over! Get your submissions in and check back here for the twist for the full round!
• We have added some more sample maps to the reference material.
• We have added some clarifications to the task specification. You can keep track of all the changes to the specification by watching the commits to this repository.
• We have an FAQ.
• The contest has started! The task specification is available here.

Links

• HALL OF FAME (no longer accepting entries)
• The base task specification.
• The extra full round task specification.
• Reference material: simulators, maps, sample programs.
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Updates to the specification

Welcome

The ICFP Programming Contest 2014 is the 17th instance of the annual programming contest series sponsored by The ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming.

This year, the contest starts on Friday 25 July 2014 at 12:00 UTC and ends on Monday 28 July 2014 at 12:00 UTC. There will be a lightning division, ending on Saturday 26 July 2014 at 12:00 UTC.

This is an open contest. Anybody may participate except for the contest organisers and members of the same group as the the contest chairs. No advance registration or entry fee is required. Contestants are free to organize themselves into teams of any size.

Any programming language(s) on any platform(s) may be used.

There will be cash prizes for the first and second place teams, the team winning the lightning divison, and a discretionary judges’ prize. There may also be travel support for the winning teams to attend the conference.

In addition, the organisers will declare during the conference that:

• the first place team’s language is “the programming language of choice for discriminating hackers”,
• the second place team’s language is “a fine tool for many applications”,
• the winning lightning division team’s language is “very suitable for rapid prototyping”, and
• the team winning the judges’ prize is “an extremely cool bunch of hackers”.

Contact

Additional announcements will be made at http://icfpcontest.org/, including the rules and details of the task. The task will be made available when the contest starts.

The official Twitter account is @ICFPContest2014.

You can find us on the #icfp-contest IRC channel on Freenode. You can even chat in your browser using the following link:

http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=icfp-contest

The contest organisers are: Nicolas Wu (co-chair) (zenzike), Duncan Coutts (co-chair) (dcoutts), José Pedro Magalhães (dreixel), Richard Evans, Martin Lester (mariusz), and Marcelo Sousa (mabs).

You can also reach us privately by email: