Friday, July 11, 2008

ICFP contest! Rovers on Mars!

The 2008 icfp contest just started! Sadly I'm at work for another several hours, but I skimmed through the description, and hopefully the programmer-lobe of my brain is already hard at work on the problem while my researcher-lobe is busy dealing with participant recruitment for a study.

This one is not all parsey like the last two years: it's all real-time execution and floating point numbers in a navigation problem. It's not the kind of thing I've thought about much, so it should be an interesting challenge. Also, my laptop plug *just* stopped working, so I may have to complete the entire task in 2 hours and 27 minutes. Hopefully they have extras in Seattle somewhere.

My plan this year is to do it in F#, since it's cool and also I'm doing a study on it for my summer internship. But they made it a little harder by not including F# in the list of supported languages. But no worries -- they do have mono (the .NET clone, not the disease), so I'll just have to upload an executable.

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