● 25 Aug 2017

As Jeremy Sawicki helpfully pointed out on the mailing list, there were some glitches in the move order for the first round of lightning results.

Lightning contest round 1 take two

We have now re-run the lightning round 1 tests and fortunately doing so did not have a huge impact on the result (most teams that did well the first time also did well the second time round).

The alternative results, which we believe fairly assign move order, are as follows.

The median number of points is 26. The important differences are that 2 teams no longer make the cut

• DiamondPrincess
• master_thesis

and 4 teams who did not do so previously now do:

• Enoch Root
• Sampou
• Sirius Cybernetics Corporation
• Skobochka

Given that we had already announced that DiamondPrincess and master_thesis had made it to round 2, we decided it not to eliminate them at this stage.

Repechage

With a bit of effort we managed to free some of the punters that had previously had their poles stuck in the mud. The 9 punters that we managed to free are the following:

• Adlersprung
• A Storm Of Minds
• chirimenjako
• code-o-matic
• LILiK
• powder
• ?!?
• Sideways Spider
• Turing Machinists

Some of these were failing to find dynamic libraries. A few more required a longer setup time than we were previously allowing. A few more do not deal correctly with redundant meta data that we were originally passing. Finally, some of them have not quite implemented the protocol correctly in that they depend on the input stream being closed after the server has sent its messages. (Part of the reason we found these fixes is because we tried a lot harder with the full contest entries and some of those attempts revealed corresponding fixes to the lightning round entries.)

We are sorry that a few punters still have their poles stuck in the mud or have sunk completely. There is only so much we can do.

One entry, chirimenjako, cheats in that it relies on writing to the file system. We decided to let this go for the lightning round as we are being a bit lax, the team were open about not managing to get serialisation of state working with lamduct, and the files they generate are small. But they will be disqualified from the full contest. (We will accommodate first-run caching and be more lenient towards punters who simply write a log file - in the latter case we will replace the log file with a soft link to /dev/null.)

With all of these newly free punters, and those who wrongly missed out in our first attempt at round 1, we decided to hold a repechage. The rules and maps are the same as for round 1 proper, but only the 4 punters who lost out to the bad move order and the 9 who got their poles stuck in the mud contested it.

The results are here.

The median number of points is 25. The teams with fewer points are eliminated.

Lightning round 2

Having run the repechage we were then in a position to run round 2 with all of those punters still in the competition.

For round 2, we used the same scheme as for round one, except the maps were a little larger (including one submitted by a participant), and we had 8 players per map. We used the following four maps.

• boston
• junction
• star
• tube

As each punter contested each map with and without futures, the minimum number of points is 8 and the maximum number of points is 64.

The results are as follows.

The median number of points this time is 37. All punters with fewer points are eliminated for the third round. The winner of the third (and final) round will be the winner of the lightning contest and will be announced at ICFP.

This time, a number of punters struggled with the larger maps and timed out. The lowest scoring punters had particular problems here. However, even some of the higher scoring punters timed out occasionally on the larger maps.

PuntTV

As usual you can watch replays of all the games on PuntTV.