Re: Thoughts on the recent ICFP contest

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

Jacob Sparre Andersen wrote:
> Ted Dennison wrote:
> 
>> I was reading over the results of this year's ICFP programming contest 
>> (http://icfpcontest.cse.ogi.edu/ ) last week.
> 
> 
>> One thing I started wondering is what libraries would have been needed 
>> to have been available for someone to complete this project 
>> competitively in Ada.
> 
> You claim our submission isn't competitive? :-)
> 
> (I am afraid it isn't)

Sorry, I didn't know there was an Ada entry. Do you have a web page for 
it somewhere?


>>   (1) An inference engine.
> 
> 
> Maybe.

You could do without one without too much trouble. But doing decision 
logic in procedural programming is a bit slower, and much harder to 
tune. So I think to get things going quickly, in the "short-long run", 
an inference engine like CLIPS would save you time. :-)


>>   (2) High-level socket bindings.
> I think the AdaSockets package is sufficient.

Hmmm...for this task better than what I was thinking of. You got one up 
on me there!


>>   (3) A generic implementation of Dijkstra's Algorithm
> I wish somebody had told me of Dijkstra's Algorithm a few weeks ago.

When we did something very similar for an AI class 14 years ago, I used 
it (as did everyone else; it was covered in class). However, I had 
completely forgotten about it since, and was only reminded by reading 
over the submission websites. So I won't make the claim that I would 
have come up with it in your place.

What would have been really nifty would have been to have my old 
project's sources available. The only change needed would have been to 
the communications code and the AI, so I could have hit the lightning 
round. But that was back when the only offline media was paper printouts 
or 9-inch reel taps (which they would never have let me have). I may 
still have a printout somewhere though...