● 06 Sep 2017

The winners of the 2017 ICFP contest were announced on Tuesday evening at ICFP. Unfortunately, due to a misunderstanding, the presentation was not recorded. (A video release form was signed, but the A/V people thought it was an administrative presentation that didn’t need to be streamed or recorded!)

You can, however, watch the replays of all the games on PuntTV, and the full results are detailed below.

Ligntning contest round 3

A total of 16 teams made it through to round 3 of the lightning contest. We evaluated the punters on two large maps with the futures extension enabled.

• Edinburgh
• ICFP coauthors

The Edinburgh map is the largest one used for evaluation. It has 10000 rivers and 32 mines.

The ICFP coauthors map includes one site for each author of an ICFP paper who has coauthored a paper with another ICFP author. The rivers are the coauthor connections. The one mine in the large connected component represents Simon Peyton Jones.

Before running the evaluation we eliminated all punters who scored 0 on the Edinburgh map - due to timing out. This left us with 8 remaining teams. We played all teams together on both maps

Following a discussion on the mailing list we adopted the methodology in the task description rather than the one we had used in the previous rounds. The difference is that we compute ranking points across all games rather than computing ranking points by first aggregating the score across all games in a group. (The current approac is a bit more fine-grained, but has little effect on the final results and no effect on the winners.)

Here are the final results.

The $ound of .\ and fixstars both did very well on the Edinburgh map, scoring an order of magnitude more than other teams. However, fixstars had problems with the coauthor map and so The $ound of .\ are a long way ahead.

The winners of the prize for 1st place in the lightning contest ($500) are The $ound of ..

We officially declare that OCaml is very suitable for rapid prototyping.

Full contest round 3

A total of 32 teams made it through to round 3 of the lightning contest. We evaluated the punters on four large maps.

• ICFP coauthors (futures+splurges)
• Vancouver (futures+splurges+options)
• Oxford (futures+splurges+options)
• Edinburgh (futures+splurges+options)

The ICFP coauthor and Edinburgh maps are the same ones we used in the lightning contest. Vancouver is a map with 3601 rivers and 4 mines. Oxford is a map with 10000 rivers and 3 mines.

Before running the evaluation we again eliminated all punters who scored 0 on the Edinburgh map (this time with all extensions enabled)

• due to timing out. This left us with 17 remaining teams. We played all teams together on all maps.

Here are the final results.

Frictionless Bananas always did well, coming first on the Edinburgh and ICFP coauthor maps and second on the other two, which were more resource-constrained. GennAI won the Vancouver map, just, and Adlersprung convincingly won the Oxford map.

The prize for second place ($500) goes to DiamondPrincess.

We officially declare that C++ is a fine tool for many applications.

The prize for first place ($1000) goes to Fricitionless Bananas.

We officially declare that C++ is the programming language of choice for discriminating hackers.

(The highest placed entry written using a genuine functional programming language was from The Blind Hen, who came fourth and who used OCaml.)

Judges prize

The winners of the judges prize ($500) are powder for providing us with the junction map which we used in the second round of both contests. The powder team asked us to point out that they are the developers of “The Powder Toy” game.

We officially declare that powder is an extremely cool bunch of hackers.