Foognostic blogs Seeking knowledge of foo

ICFP contest 2008 kickoff

Okay, I've got the live cd image, the svn repo, the trac instance, and now the requirements. The goal is to navigate a Martian rover to the center of a rectangle. The immobile obstacles are the borders, boulders, and craters. Moving obstacles are Martians with 14 fingers worshipping a heartless pantheon of deities. The software to be written is the controller, which decides and guides the rover homeward.

My initial impressions:

1. Simple socket i/o required
2. It would be nice to have a UI for the board
3. Need to detect collisions
4. Need to deal with telemetry data
5. Need to remember that boulders will obscure other items
6. Five runs per trial, initialization sent once per trial.
7. Need to build the package
8. Need to pick a language

Big questions

1. Rotational velocity:  how to gauge this
2. How to represent prior moves? Simply an array?

ICFP 2008

The eleventh ICFP starts tomorrow. I'm going to try it and see how far I get. The results should be amusing.

In the meantime, trac and svn servers have been setup. Self-signed certs, so expect a warning. Ping me for an account!