This weekend is the annual ICFP programming competition, a 72 hour event that is usually a lot of fun. Luckily, you don't even have to work flat out for the full period. People have been known to live full and happy lives at the same time as they spend a few hours each day working on their solution. Which is lucky, because I can't set aside every waking moment between now and Monday.

The problem statement was released just over an hour ago and it looks like another good one. After one read through, it looked almost incomprehensible. Another pass through and you can see the details emerging and the cleverness in the design. These problems are tricky to write: it has to be hard enough to be almost solvable in 72 hours, without being impossible or having a trick to come up with a perfect answer immediately. The problem statement also has to, ideally, incorporate some test cases in some way so that we can validate the implementations we are writing. This year seems to have done that in a couple of clever ways.

I'm not going to live-blog the event or anything, but I might post something like a chronology afterwards if I work through to completion.

Topics: software/icfp competition

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