Not too long ago, Lindsey Kuper and I stepped into the ring once again to compete in the ICFP Programming Contest!
She's writing up the full story over on Geek Buffet.
The quick recap, however! The problem had to deal with orbital mechanics -- we were to control a simulated satellite as it orbits a simulated earth. First, you just had to transfer orbits, then meet other satellites, and it got increasingly complex from there.
Thankfully, the physics simulator for each kind of problem was included. All you had to do to use it was implement the contest-specific VM! (Easy, right?) Thankfully, the specification for the VM was super-clear, and we got it working surprisingly quickly.
By the end of the contest, we could handle the first two problem types, and that was competitive enough for 120th place worldwide, by the morning when they turned off the leaderboard. Good show, us!
For the full scoop, go read Lindsey's account.
Here's the code! We used Scheme and Python, and R for the visualizations.
Showing posts with label atlhack. Show all posts
Showing posts with label atlhack. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
possible upcoming projects
I need a cool side project. I have a bunch of ideas that I think would be interesting: here they are. I've already started futzing around with a few of these... comments or suggestions are definitely welcome.
New Things To Build
- Sketch out and build an online community where kids can make stuff in code and share it with each other, like MOOSE Crossing only awesome and on the web and easy to use and linkable. Does this want to be made of Scratch, or similar to it? Can we include proper inheritance? Make it work for the OLPC.
- TEB. Make TEB awesome. Does TEB want to use/be part of/merge with gnoetry? Related: That horoscope remixer thing that never worked right.
- Some automated way to calculate Erdos numbers, probably with the help of DBLP.
- A Scrabble bot. I've been thinking about this a lot, actually, looking at different algorithms for permuting strings -- but I think I can do Scrabble without looking at permutations... maybe all you really care about is whether certain groups of letters constitute the same bag. If it turns out we don't have to permute things (in n!), then we can probably plan several turns ahead. This might be similar to playing Backgammon,, but maybe we can't do something like that kind of policy learning; your set of possible actions changes so much every turn, and you'd have to use probability estimates to look into future turns...
Interesting Exercises, way already done by other people
- Build a language and virtual machine. Educational for me, not very useful for other people. Recommended by Strick. Building a VM at a pretty high level of abstraction might not be that hard, just think about stack frames and returning things. At what level do things like the Python VM work? The JVM? Surely there are different approaches used for this; what are they? Would it be hard to build something with multithreading in mind from the bottom up? What about a purely functional lambda-calculus implementation?
- Write a checkers bot. Tree search, AB pruning, etc. are pretty well understood, even by me -- the hard thing would be an evaluation function.
- Build a MUD, or at least a MUD framework. But in Scheme. ynniv and I somehow never got around to that...
- Another Sudoku solver. But in Haskell.
New Things To Build
- Sketch out and build an online community where kids can make stuff in code and share it with each other, like MOOSE Crossing only awesome and on the web and easy to use and linkable. Does this want to be made of Scratch, or similar to it? Can we include proper inheritance? Make it work for the OLPC.
- TEB. Make TEB awesome. Does TEB want to use/be part of/merge with gnoetry? Related: That horoscope remixer thing that never worked right.
- Some automated way to calculate Erdos numbers, probably with the help of DBLP.
- A Scrabble bot. I've been thinking about this a lot, actually, looking at different algorithms for permuting strings -- but I think I can do Scrabble without looking at permutations... maybe all you really care about is whether certain groups of letters constitute the same bag. If it turns out we don't have to permute things (in n!), then we can probably plan several turns ahead. This might be similar to playing Backgammon,, but maybe we can't do something like that kind of policy learning; your set of possible actions changes so much every turn, and you'd have to use probability estimates to look into future turns...
Interesting Exercises, way already done by other people
- Build a language and virtual machine. Educational for me, not very useful for other people. Recommended by Strick. Building a VM at a pretty high level of abstraction might not be that hard, just think about stack frames and returning things. At what level do things like the Python VM work? The JVM? Surely there are different approaches used for this; what are they? Would it be hard to build something with multithreading in mind from the bottom up? What about a purely functional lambda-calculus implementation?
- Write a checkers bot. Tree search, AB pruning, etc. are pretty well understood, even by me -- the hard thing would be an evaluation function.
- Build a MUD, or at least a MUD framework. But in Scheme. ynniv and I somehow never got around to that...
- Another Sudoku solver. But in Haskell.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
gmaps and quicksilver
So I've started work on the gmaps mashup for runners I'd mentioned last time... the Google Maps API is very straightforward, easy to understand. And getting a simple example working is quick. I'm not surprised, but it turns out to be very pleasant. Everything you wanted to know about gmaps is right there, have at!
Also: my ATLhack compatriot Erik introduced me to this really nice interface tweak for Mac OS X -- quicksilver. It lets you do a lot less mousing on the Mac, which is a pretty welcome change -- a quick key-tap, and it pops up a window where you type the first few letters of something, say an application or a folder or whatever, and it searches out what you probably mean! It seems like it's more efficient than reaching for the mouse, and for right now I've taken everything off my Dock to see if quicksilver is a viable replacement. Thanks, Erik!
Also: my ATLhack compatriot Erik introduced me to this really nice interface tweak for Mac OS X -- quicksilver. It lets you do a lot less mousing on the Mac, which is a pretty welcome change -- a quick key-tap, and it pops up a window where you type the first few letters of something, say an application or a folder or whatever, and it searches out what you probably mean! It seems like it's more efficient than reaching for the mouse, and for right now I've taken everything off my Dock to see if quicksilver is a viable replacement. Thanks, Erik!
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