12th ICFP competition

[Kirit Sælensminde]

There's clearly some interest in Google Wave, but there's something a little closer that might also be fun and something I think BarCamp Thailand can make a big splash in.

If you've not heard of it before then the ICFP competition is a programming competition for teams from across the world. ICFP is the International Conference on Functional Programming. Don't worry though, it's not just for functional programming languages. The winners are invited to the conference (they do have some cash to help with travel expenses).

You don't have to be a programmer to join the team. Some of the things that are needed will be:
* Help with project management
* Team communication
* Ideas, brainstorming
* Testing
* Enthusiasm (especially important after those long coding sprints)

The competition is going to be held next weekend. If I have my timezones worked out right then I think the puzzle will be announced at 1am on Friday night/Saturday morning and we would have until the same time Monday night/Tuesday morning.

If you've not heard of it before then check out the previous year's tasks and results linked from this year's competition page.

    http://www.icfpcontest.org/

Last year team Felspar entered and didn't do too badly considering "team" Felspar was only me and I only had about 8 hours of coding time that w/e.

I'm not sure whether we should be many teams or one big team -- I guess it depends on how many people are interested. Personally I think that three to four people is probably ideal for this sort of thing, and being in the same place will help. The Felspar offices will be open over the w/e for those that want to join us here.

I'll certainly be doing it again, the real question is how many others want to test their programming skills against some of the best in the world? This is a great way to promote Thailand as somewhere that does know how to build great technology.

So who's in?


Kirit

[Chip]

It sounds great. I have time but I'm not a programmer, then is there anything I can help :D

2009/6/21 Kirit Sælensminde <ki...@felspar.com>

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[proteus guy]

I'm game. Can you describe what the competition was last time and what you did? What languages/tools do you anticipate we'd be using.

  -- Ben

[Kirit Sælensminde]

Chip wrote:

It sounds great. I have time but I'm not a programmer, then is there anything I can help :D

I expect that there's going to be a lot that you can do:

* Make sure that the problem is properly understand
* Have good ideas about how to solve it
* Document what we're up to and write about it

I expect that people will be coming and going during the course of the weekend. One useful thing would be just hang out on IRC and help people to catch up when they show up.


K

[Kirit Sælensminde]

proteus guy wrote:

I'm game. Can you describe what the competition was last time and what you did? What languages/tools do you anticipate we'd be using.

The task description is here:
    http://smlnj.org/icfp08-contest/task.html

My code is here:
    http://svn.felspar.com/public/icfp/2008/trunk/

Taking last year's as a template it could have been handled by a few loosely coupled teams:

• Build and submission -- the entry had to be capable of building and running on a VM run by the competition organisers. This meant building a build system as part of the submissions and making sure that the builds would work on the target environment.
  
• Telemetry and rover control -- Not a huge task, but absolutely critical.
  
• AI -- Where most of the work and the ideas was needed. The rover controller would need to provide a good API for this. My AI was the simplest possible as I didn't have time to put any real work into it.
  
• Map generation -- The organisers supplied some simple test maps, but to really exercise the AI and control systems more maps would have been useful. I didn't make any.
• A/B AI testing -- Something I didn't even have time to think about last year, but some sort of system or procedure to test the AIs against each other and the maps to make a decision about which should be submitted.
  

This could all be handled by a small team, or broken out to a few larger teams concentrating on each area.

For infrastructure, Felspar can provide a Subversion server and an issue tracker/wiki (on our Support site).

If it was just me, I'd probably mainly use C++ and Python -- Python for speed of development, and C++ for execution speed. I'd use Boost.Python to plug them together. For a larger team though I think it'd be important that people could use their preferred languages.

It's almost certainly an early optimisation to try to work out what the correct team structure would be and the right tools until we've seen the problem. Last year the submission was source code that the organisers had to build and run, in most previous years it has been the answer to what amounts to a number of complex riddles. Which of these is used this year will make a huge difference to how we structure ourselves  and what the important tasks are.


K

[Kirit Sælensminde]

Kirit Sælensminde wrote:

proteus guy wrote:

I'm game. Can you describe what the competition was last time and what you did? What languages/tools do you anticipate we'd be using.

The task description is here:
    http://smlnj.org/icfp08-contest/task.html

My code is here:
    http://svn.felspar.com/public/icfp/2008/trunk/

As an addendum, I did do a quick write up just after the competition which is here:
    http://www.kirit.com/Blog:/2008-07-15/ICFP%202008

Rather surprisingly the rover did make it through the first round of heats, but got knocked out in the second:
    http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~sheard/2008IcfpContest/results/final/results-by-score-Final-2.html
(Search for Felspar in the page)


K

[proteus guy]

    This looks really cool. If we could try to implement this as some kind of Agile Sprint it could be good fun. Looking at http://icfpcontest.org/ it appears this contest will be significantly different than last years. Since it looks like you can submit your code to run on any of several (yet un-named) platforms, I would assume that performance of the application will not be a significant factor in scoring unlike last year's which was all about timing. Game simulations seem to be quite popular but there are also some language or data processing tasks from the prior contests that can be viewed at links present on the same page.

    Hopefully the contest task will be an interesting one.

  -- Ben

[Nick Martin]

I think it will be interesting. Had a look at the previous years and the FAQ for this year states that there is no restriction on language or platform.

Quite intrigued as to what the challenge will be this year. Oh additionally there is no size limit for teams.

Nick

"The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from."

http://www.twitter.com/ntmartin

[proteus guy]

It's quite likely that we would need testers, an agile task board co-ordinator, possibly team liason(s), drink mixers, cheerleaders, etc... Just get over to BKK. :-)

  -- Ben

[Jean Jordaan]

I'm in too :-)

--
jean . .. .... //\\\oo///\\

[31o5 OHIRA]

i'm in - let me think what i can do....

31o5

[31o5 OHIRA]

This sounds great, and to promote Thailand as Kirit says - this thread should be translated into Thai... could anybody help?

ah... if my Thai was good then I can participate this as translator :( I'm not hard-core programmer, maybe I can be a waitress serving strong coffee for geeks :D

31o5

[Nick Martin]

Black no sugar please ;)

[sajal]

count me in ...

Since Satoko already took the coffee ... i can be the drink mixer ...

I suck at programing... just manage to get things working quick n
dirty... This looks like an oppurtunity to see how the "big boys" do
things...

On Jun 21, 11:37 pm, proteus guy <proteus...@gmail.com> wrote:
> It's quite likely that we would need testers, an agile task board
> co-ordinator, possibly team liason(s), drink mixers, cheerleaders, etc...
> Just get over to BKK. :-)
>
>   -- Ben
>

> > Email: c...@huyenchip.com

[proteus guy]

big boys eh? hmm.... seems Satoko & Sajal are putting a lot of pressure on us guys... haha we might actually have to do some of this stuff now...

[31o5 OHIRA]

sajal

would you come to my office? I thought I come over to Kirit's with proteusguy etc, but maybe I just stay in my office and be online....

or anybody around suk, we can do little camp at my office if anybody want (then I can be a waitress).

31o5

[proteus guy]

If you're all going to help run the sprints & the agile board kinda need to be there. Serving drinks requires a physical presence too!!! come on!!

[31o5 OHIRA]

ah... ok, i got only little eeePC, not enough to work. so thought better to stay online with my computer at office.

but i'd love to be there physically, it's gonna be fun :)

31o5

[proteus guy]

someone's making excuses. you don't need any more than what you got. :-)

[Till]

so wait are you guys planning to pull an all-nighter?

[Kirit Sælensminde]

Till wrote:

so wait are you guys planning to pull an all-nighter?
  

Not sure about that, but it could happen. Lightning round would need to be in by 1am on Sunday morning/Saturday night. I think we'll certainly be up that late as we are planning to put in a lightning round entry.


K

[31o5 OHIRA]

ok, i'll be there :-)



31o5

[proteus guy]

That's the plan when it starts at 1am. Kirit's gonna provide massage girls and drinks. hahaha

[Kirit Sælensminde]

proteus guy wrote:

That's the plan when it starts at 1am. Kirit's gonna provide massage girls and drinks. hahaha

I'd kind of assumed that we would meet on Saturday morning which would let us attack it fresh and give us some time to think about things properly first.

1am read the problem
2am sleep
8am get up
9am meet up

We could move those last two back an hour of course.



K

[sajal]

> 8am get up

Huston, we have a problem!!

or not if i sleep clinching a fresh bottle of red bull...