Wednesday 10 October 2007

Endo lives!

At the International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP) in Freiburg last week, we announced the results of the ICFP Programming Contest 2007.

Just as last year, the first prize was won by Team Smartass from Google research.



The second prize was one by the United Coding Team from the University of Cape Town, South Africa.



The judges' prize was won by Celestial Dire Badger (Jed Davis).



The highest survival chance produced during the contest (by Team Smartass) was over 90%, so Endo survived! Endo actually came with us to Freiburg to say `thank you' to the people present.



Later in the week he was spotted by several ICFP attendants in the city of Freiburg, running around and enjoying himself.

5 comments:

Denis said...

Is there a video of the talk??

Johan Jeuring said...

Yes, there are two or three videos of the talk. We will publish a link as soon as one of those videos is on-line.

There is also a report about the contest: see http://www.cs.uu.nl/research/techreps/UU-CS-2007-029.html

Clive said...

Can you tell us what approach the winning team used to solve the problem? I suppose this might be made clear in the video(s) of your presentation when they are posted, but so far I've not been able to find any write-up by Team Smartass - not even if I use Google as my search engine! :-)

Johan Jeuring said...

I'll forward your question to the Google team. We didn't say much about the approach followed by the Google team in the talk, besides that is was very cleverly done...

Unknown said...

You can see their final image in the background of the first photo in this post. I had a brief opportunity to chat with Daniel at the conference (he only came for the awards, not the whole conference).

From what I gathered they followed a fairly similar route to our team of gradually hacking away at the DNA. They also never got the BMU fully working and hence did manual placements of several things. They were working on an approximation of the speech bubble though, something we never spent time on and could have given them a healthy lead.