How did it go?

The ICFP Contest 2007 ended last Monday. We have seen writeups of several teams that participated in the ICFP Contest. Many of those are interesting and sometimes funny reading. We particularly enjoyed

http://stereotype441.livejournal.com/45150.html

Marco Galotta collected a list of writeups, and posted them on his blog

http://marco-za.blogspot.com/2007/07/icfp-how-we-reached-top-15.html

We don't want to give our writeup now, we'll do that for ICFP in Freiburg, but we do want to briefly share our experiences.

We had a very hectic and pleasant time. I cannot remember I've had such an intense time at work before.

Headquarters was never empty during the 72 hours of the contest. We had a laptop showing several screens via a beamer: last 20 submissions, standings, the icfp mail account, several irc channels devoted to the contest, etc. Not much happened in the middle of the contest, but both the start and end were very hectic. The end was a thriller, I can assure you. But more about that at the ICFP conference in Freiburg.

Everything went fine. We haven't discovered an error in the task description yet. Initially we were worried about the slow start by many teams, but as time passed we were increasingly impressed by the creativity and cleverness of many teams. We have excellent winners. Our machines were unreachable twice for a short period, but that hasn't been a problem. Web statistics show that we processed millions of hits in these three days. All in all we are quite satisfied by how things went.

From now on we will prepare our presentation at Freiburg. By then we will know whether or not Endo survived. In the presentation we will discuss the problem, possible solutions, techniques we used to create the problem, solutions we have seen from the participants, the winners, etc. We will hand out a writeup about the contest in Freiburg.