From spoons at cs.cmu.edu Wed Jul 19 23:04:51 2006 From: spoons at cs.cmu.edu (Daniel Spoonhower) Date: Wed Jul 19 23:04:53 2006 Subject: [icfp-annouce] codex released Message-ID: <44BEF2D3.3040801@cs.cmu.edu> Greetings, ICFP Contest Participants! The first part of the contest materials, the codex, is now available on the contest web site. You may download it at any time before or during the contest. The remainder of the contest materials will be released on Friday at noon (EDT). http://www.icfpcontest.org/ For the Organizers, Dan From spoons at cs.cmu.edu Fri Jul 21 12:02:39 2006 From: spoons at cs.cmu.edu (Daniel Spoonhower) Date: Fri Jul 21 12:02:41 2006 Subject: [icfp-announce] task announced! Message-ID: <44C0FA9F.6090509@cs.cmu.edu> We are proud to announce that the 2006 ICFP Programming Contest is now open. The website has been updated to include a detailed task description and an updated set of rules. The task description is located at: http://www.icfpcontest.org/task.shtml The rules and any updates may be found at: http://www.icfpcontest.org/rulesfaq.shtml After you complete the first phase of the task, you will need two important pieces of team-specific information. We will begin distributing these to teams now, using the e-mail you supplied during team registration. If you have not received this e-mail within 30 minutes, please register your team again. Good luck! The 2006 ICFP Contest Organizers From tom7 at cs.cmu.edu Fri Jul 21 12:28:52 2006 From: tom7 at cs.cmu.edu (Tom Murphy VII) Date: Fri Jul 21 12:28:51 2006 Subject: [icfp-announce] Team e-mails slightly delayed... Message-ID: <44C100C4.8030406@cs.cmu.edu> In our last e-mail we asked that you re-register your team if you didn't receive an e-mail with team info by 12:30. It turns out this was slightly too optimistic: We haven't actually started sending these e-mails yet, so don't worry if you haven't gotten one yet. Please don't re-register unti, say, 1:00. Have fun! Tom From spoons at cs.cmu.edu Fri Jul 21 13:46:03 2006 From: spoons at cs.cmu.edu (Daniel Spoonhower) Date: Fri Jul 21 13:46:04 2006 Subject: [icfp-announce] team information sent Message-ID: <44C112DB.6080101@cs.cmu.edu> Contestants, We've sent out team information for all teams that registered before 1:30 EDT. If you registered before 1:30 EDT and have *not* received email containing a decryption key, please contact us at: icfpcontest-organizers@lists.andrew.cmu.edu Thanks, Dan (and the Organizers) From tom7 at cs.cmu.edu Fri Jul 21 23:19:57 2006 From: tom7 at cs.cmu.edu (Tom Murphy VII) Date: Fri Jul 21 23:19:58 2006 Subject: [icfp-announce] Reverse engineering Message-ID: <44C1995D.8040605@cs.cmu.edu> Warning: Spoilers follow; if you do not have a working UM yet, you may wish to save this e-mail until you do. There have been several questions about "reverse engineering" the codex. The rules page states that all entries must be in the spirit of the contest, and states that manipulating the behavior of the codex is disallowed. We wish to clarify further what kinds of reverse engineering fall within the spirit of the contest and what kinds do not. The contest consists of a series of puzzles for you to solve. The UMIX user passwords are not puzzles. They are intended to be a fun way to discover the problems incrementally. However, your team may discover these passwords with any programming method, including observing the internal state of the UM. (Though this is definitely not necessary or encouraged!) The way that you are supposed to solve puzzles is by interacting with a compliant UM implementation running the codex that we provided. For teams considered for prizes, we will verify that this interaction took place by looking at the source code of programs that they wrote. This means that causing the Codex to generate publications by manipulating its behavior is explicitly disallowed. We don't think it will help you, but observing the behavior of the UM while solving puzzles is allowed. The only exception is the puzzle contained in user howie's account (adventure); the spirit of this problem requries that you do not observe the state of the UM while solving it. We expect this issue does not affect most teams, and recommend against reverse-engineering in general. If your team plans to do something that you think might violate the spirit of the contest, please ask us first. ICFP 2006 Organizers From spoons at cs.cmu.edu Sat Jul 22 12:04:00 2006 From: spoons at cs.cmu.edu (Daniel Spoonhower) Date: Sat Jul 22 12:05:40 2006 Subject: [icfp-announce] day-one update Message-ID: <44C24C70.5090603@cs.cmu.edu> Greetings, contestants! Congratulations on everything you have achieved in the first 24 hours! Many teams have made much more progress than we expected. A special shout-out goes to our current leaders, Witrala, Begot, and Entirely Non-Serious. We encourage everyone to keep up the hard work: there are lots of unsolved puzzles and many more points available. Although the Cult of the Bound Variable was extremely careful in its scholarly work, the graduate students that transcribed the codex have been known to make mistakes occasionally. We have been informed of one such mistake and recorded it on the rules/FAQ web page. This mistake is not significant and should not prevent you from making progress on solving the puzzles. http://www.icfpcontest.org/rulesfaq.shtml#errata The Contest Organizers From spoons at cs.cmu.edu Sat Jul 22 16:43:31 2006 From: spoons at cs.cmu.edu (Daniel Spoonhower) Date: Sat Jul 22 16:43:48 2006 Subject: [icfp-announce] antomaton issue Message-ID: <44C28DF3.20702@cs.cmu.edu> Warning: Spoilers follow; if you do not have a working UM yet, you may wish to save this e-mail until you do. Dear contestants, An issue with the Antomaton problem has been reported: the antomaton simulator will accept some solutions that are invalid according to the specification. Specifically, every wildcard "*" in the board pattern must be replaced with some symbol (other than a goal "$"). Every other symbol in your solution must match the pattern. We are currently assessing the problem with the simulator, but please be aware that when calculating final scores, we will only grant credit for solutions that are valid according to the specification. We will post more information as soon as we can, but in the meantime, we encourage teams to work on other problems or to carefully verify that their solutions match the appropriate pattern. The Organizers From drl at cs.cmu.edu Sat Jul 22 22:01:43 2006 From: drl at cs.cmu.edu (Dan Licata) Date: Sat Jul 22 22:01:45 2006 Subject: [icfp-announce] New Contest Materials Message-ID: <20060723020143.GB6822@cs.cmu.edu> As we near the half-way point of the contest, we have some exciting news! SANDmark ******** We have just learned from our friends in the Computational Archaeolinguistics Institute of another scroll that may be of interest to some participants. The scroll is titled "SANDmark," and it appears to serve two purposes: - It includes a more comprehensive self-checking suite than the original codex; this may be useful to participants who are still working on the UM. - All participants may enjoy using it to benchmark UM performance. http://www.icfpcontest.org/sandmark.umz For your reference, the output of running SANDmark can be found on the Web page: http://www.icfpcontest.org/sandmark-output.txt Codex: Volume 8 *************** We have corrected several transcription errors that were present in the original version of the codex: * The ants simulator (in 'gardener') no longer accepts solutions that do not match the puzzle's pattern. As part of this transcription error, two letters in the publication name were inadvertently flipped. We will remove all ANTOM publications from the scoreboard. Please rerun your solutions with the new codex to generate equivalent ANTWO publications. * The 2d parser (in 'ohmega') gracefully rejects the ill-formed programs mentioned on the Web site. Additionally, we have removed some spurious parentheses from the specification. * The fourth and sixth examples in the balance specification (in 'yang') have been corrected. * There were several minor typographical changes, including item descriptions in adventure (in 'howie'). Additionally, the codex now incorporates a less verbose version of the newly-discovered self checks. This codex can be distinguished from the previous by the following criteria: (1) After decryption, it will print == CBV ARCHIVE == VOLUME ID 8 (2) The size of the decompressed UM binary is 15923864 bytes The corrected codex is available on the Web: http://www.icfpcontest.org/codex.umz Professor Bovik thanks you for all your hard work so far. The Contest Organizers From drl at cs.cmu.edu Sun Jul 23 16:37:10 2006 From: drl at cs.cmu.edu (Dan Licata) Date: Sun Jul 23 16:37:45 2006 Subject: [icfp-announce] Day 3! Message-ID: <20060723203710.GA26581@cs.cmu.edu> Now that we're in the third day of the contest, we have a few announcements for you: - Congratulations to our current leaders, Team Smartass, kuma-, and PLOP. We are happy to report that over 300 teams have now completed the UM, many of them in the past 12 hours. We're very impressed with everyone's hard work! - We've posted a couple of new transcription errors in the balance problem (user id 'yang') to the FAQ. http://www.icfpcontest.org/rulesfaq.shtml - Remember that the scoreboard will not be updated after 4:00 AM (EDT). - We will make an announcement later today about how to submit code and commentary for the Judges' prize. The Judges' prize is awarded at our discretion for the coolest, most interesting bit of programming---for example, clever unexpected solutions to puzzles, an alarmingly fast UM implementation, etc. -Dan