OBE
Overcome By Events -- this is my excuse for NOT submitting an entry for the ICFP contest this year. It's Sunday, 0900 EDT as I write this and not a single line of code has been written. On top of that, today is going to be busy. Maybe next year.
ICFP 2009 is off and running!
Well, the ICFP 2009 programming challenge started today. Team Foognostic has signed up (so far includes: me) and has skimmed through the problem description. It's a little premature to judge it, but the task kind of feels like a MMIXed up version of last year's contest.
Unless something awesome happens the physics portion of the challenge will be tackled last, if at all. And I still intend to use Clojure.. I have a little ant based environment to assist.
If anyone is interested in joining team Foognostic, shoot me a mail at tbbs@sbbtabfgvp.arg, unless rot13 ain't your thing. Don't wait though, the contest ends June 29th at 14:00 CDT!
Clojure for the ICFP 2009 contest?
So the programming contest for the 12th International Conference on Functional Programming is coming up soon -- June 26th - 29th. Last year team Foognostic submitted a Ruby-based solution which made it to the second round. This year we will take another stab at it, this time with Clojure. Anyone else interested?
Last year I installed Trac to help organize things and that was fun, but this year I think BitBucket is the way to go. More features that someone else maintains -- woo!
This year another Foognostic solution will be submitted, barring unexpected events that weekend. For the sake of trying to look cool I will be using Clojure, mostly as an exercise to really explore a Lisp. I'm more familiar with Emacs Lisp, but Clojure is sitting right on top of all those featuriffic Java APIs.
The countdown timer stands at a little more than two weeks. That should be enough time to come up to speed, right? ... or have I just uttered famous last words?
In any event, watch this space for updates!
- The ICFP 2009 contest site.
- The ICFP 2008 task description.
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 
ICFP results pending
Well, I finally got the GUI server running on MacOSX. The results weren't pretty, but they weren't hideous. The client code didn't crash after several runs. However, the rover continually bumps against the top of the map.
It's about what I expected. I put a lot of time into the infrastructure, and had literally a few hours to slop together some navigation logic. The code had never been exercised against a server before submission. Time was brutally scarce that weekend, and I couldn't cover all the bases alone in that amount of time.
The results are pending... fingers crossed for better than last place!
The package is ready!!
Well, I had to settle for ignoring obstacles. And the turning and acceleration heuristics are pretty odd. Hopefully the rover will drift towards the origin.
https://trac.foognostic.net/browser/icfp08/trunk
Changeset 31 -- need to tag it.
Time to upload!
Time to break out the graph paper!
The client can send motion commands now. The server is spewing random telemetry entries rather than honoring the the rover commands. Also it has no map awareness -- just a shell to exercise the networking layers and build the skeleton code. At this point it's finally time to take a Cartesian plane ride! (sorry)
shoulda had a tweet
["3450", "aL", "-234.040", "811.100", "47.5", "8.450", "b", "-220.00", "750.00", "12.000", "m", "-240.000", "812.000", "90.0", "9.100"]
<Icfp_telemetry:0x1e050 @speed=8.45, @turn="L", @craters=[], @dir=47.5, @accel="a", @boulders=[#<Icfp_boulder:0x1dac4 @y_pos=750.0, @x_pos=-220.0, @opaque=true, @radius=12.0>], @ypos=811.1, @ts=3450, @aliens=[#<Icfp_alien:0x1d9d4 @velocity=9.1, @y_pos=812.0, @angle=90.0, @x_pos=-240.0, @opaque=false, @radius=0.4>], @xpos=-234.04, @home=nil>
finally, some client / server interchange
Finally! Basic client server interop: https://trac.foognostic.net/changeset/12
