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Report on the tenth ICFP programming contest

Published:20 September 2008Publication History
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Abstract

The ICFP programming contest is a 72-hour contest, which attracts thousands of contestants from all over the world. In this report we describe what it takes to organise this contest, the main ideas behind the contest we organised, the task, how to solve it, how we created it, and how well the contestants did.

This year's task was to reverse engineer the DNA of a stranded alien life form to enable it to survive on our planet. The alien's DNA had to be modified by means of a prefix that modified its meaning so that the alien's phenotype would approximate a given "ideal" outcome, increasing its probability of survival. About 357 teams from 39 countries solved at least part of the contest. The language of choice for discriminating hackers turned out to be C++.

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References

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
      ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 43, Issue 9
      ICFP '08
      September 2008
      399 pages
      ISSN:0362-1340
      EISSN:1558-1160
      DOI:10.1145/1411203
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      • cover image ACM Conferences
        ICFP '08: Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
        September 2008
        422 pages
        ISBN:9781595939197
        DOI:10.1145/1411204

      Copyright © 2008 ACM

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 20 September 2008

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