ICFP 2008 post mortem
Well, team Foognostic slightly exceeded expectations, but I think only by luck. The goal was to write a fully functional client, and the hope was to make it navigate around a grid. The goal was accomplished -- the code installed, received commands, and sent commands exactly as specified. The hope was not realized... a few rushed hours produced some really, really wrong code for navigating.
Round one had no aliens, and the code actually found home base once. This was purely a coincidence of where the rover was started and the worse-than-random dain-bramaged movement code. The other three times the timer expired. So we barely squeaked by round one.
Round two went as it should have. Five trials -- three timeouts and two alien encounters. Not nearly good enough to advance.
I'd like to blame lack of time and to be fair, that weekend was uncommonly busy. But the real failure was not raising a team. Parts of the task could be dealt with in parallel... next time I'm going for the full court press -- so if you know me and like to code -- watch out 
