Team Orange and ICFP PC

Last weekend Leon and I took part in the eighth annual ICFP (International Conference of Functional Programming) Programming Contest, under the name "Team Orange" (blame Leon). It really showed me how rusty my programming was after too long in sales/professional services and now management. Also of note is that as a thirty year old married man with a house and a cat I don't have as much time as a 20 something computer science student, on the bright side however I no longer regard pot noodle as a decent meal.

It probably wasn't a good idea to use the ICFP PC as a refresher excercise as the various problem(s) involved were non-trivial to say the least, however it was a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to the second part this weekend and future contests.

However next year, I'm going to prepare more in advance, a few things that spring to mind that would have helped,

    1) Setup a farm of fast test machines, for experimenting with constants such as heuristic weightings.
    2) Do visualisation early - we did it late but when we had it, it told us a lot more about how our programs were doing.   
    3) Revise some algorithms before hand - graph algorithms, A*, etc.
    4) Get more people!

Lastly here is a visualisation of our bot in action. Blue dots are the cops that we are controlling, orange is the robber, yellow are the banks the robber is trying to get and the green spots make up our "infocloud" basically a collection of evidence (including bank location) that is weighted and adjusted over time.

(You might be able to see this better at http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=21923826&size=o)

Comments

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