[icfp-announce] Reverse engineering

[Tom Murphy VII]

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