ICFP programming contest 2008

ICFP programming contest is an international programming competition held annually since 1998, associated with the International Conference on Functional Programming.

This year the contest was organized by the Portland State University and the University of Chicago and ran 11th-14th of July. The task was to create a Mars rover controller, which can guide the rover to the home base avoiding static obstacles and Martians who are eager to destroy the rover.

Once we were aware of the competition we decided to take part in the 11th ICFP programming contest. It was considered as a great challenge for the team, where everyone expected to have a lot of fun.

On Saturday morning the team conducted the first meeting regarding the 'Rover' project. During the meeting the main strategy of development was agreed, basic tasks were defined and taken into work.

In short, we identified following components:

• communication protocol handler
• Martian surface object model
• rover behaviour strategy

As a result of the first day the core of the development competition task was finished and our rover got possibility to reach the home base without any obstacles.

Rather good start on Saturday helped us to define deeper major and minor improvements of the already developed functional tasks on Sunday. We had improved functionality of the rover motion, which made possible for rover to avoid obstacles and Martians. At the end of Sunday we got the Rover version which passed all of the test maps successfully.

On Monday was working day and our guys could devote only few hours making minor improvements. And in the evening we submitted our application.

Results were announced on 23rd of September. Intelliarts's Mars rover controller eliminated in 10th of 11 round and took 15th place by total score among 336 submissions from other teams.

That was a great experience and a nice result.