Past Tasks
| Year | Organiser | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1998 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | Write a program that plays pousse, an odd variant of tic-tac-toe. Contestant programs were entered into a tournament to determine the first- and second-place program. |
| 1999 | Harvard University | Size-optimize case statements (the contest task spoke about text-based adventure games, but in fact the task was to size-optimize the description of such a game). |
| 2000 | Cornell University | Implement a ray tracer using a Postscript-like syntax. |
| 2001 | INRIA Rocquencourt | Size-optimize an HTML-like markup language by removing unnecessary whitespace and tags, and so on. |
| 2002 | OGI School of Science and Engineering | Implement robots playing a Sokoban-like game one against each other. |
| 2003 | Chalmers University | Implement robots driving a car as fast as possible through different racing tracks. |
| 2004 | University of Pennsylvania | Design an ant colony that will bring the most food particles back to its anthill, while fending off ants of another species. The contest entry would output a state-machine description of the ant: in principle, entries could have been written by hand. Later the task was adapted into Ant Wars, a strategy and programming game where each participant is a species of ant. The participant then, in a language called Antomata, program a finite state machine to function as the brain of each ant. The ant brain then control the ant to find and collect food to bring to the home ant hill, to fend off attackers or making trails of pheromones. |
| 2005 | PLT group | Implement "bots" for a "Cops & Robbers" game: contestants have to write the control program that guides a Robber-Bot through a quiet urban neighborhood on a mission to rob every bank without getting caught, and the control program for a Cop-Bot dedicated to stopping it. |
| 2006 | Carnegie Mellon University | Implement a virtual machine that runs an operating system (called UMIX) provided by the judges, and crack it using new programming languages with unconventional syntax and semantics, such as 2D and a version of BASIC using Roman numerals. Many puzzles were tiny versions or parodies of previous contests. |
| 2007 | Utrecht University | Implement a 2-stage virtual machine that executes a DNA-like string to produce an image. Then, given an input string for this machine, find a prefix that when added to this string yields an image as close as possible to the given target image. |
| 2008 | Portland State University and the University of Chicago | Provide a Mars rover control system that will guide it to a home base while avoiding obstacles and enemies. |
| 2009 | University of Kansas | Control a satellite to move between specified orbits and rendezvous with other satellites. |
| 2010 | Leipzig University of Applied Science, Germany | International Car and Fuel Production. |
| 2011 | Tohoku University, Japan | Program a computer with 256 "slots" to outlast its opponent in terms of slots remaining at the end of the match. Submissions include executables that are entered into a two-phase tournament. |
| 2012 | University of St Andrews, Scotland | Program an AI for a Boulder Dash-like game. |
Read more about this topic: ICFP Programming Contest
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“Everything I do is done within sight of the Führer, so that my faults or mistakes are never hidden from him. I do my very utmost to live and act in such a manner that the Führer should remain satisfied with me; I am hard-working; but whether I shall always be able to cope with the tasks entrusted to me in the future as well, is an open question.”
—Martin Bormann (1900–1945)
“Mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)