<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">The ICFP programming contest[1] is this weekend (starting Friday, about 11am our time).<br><br>For those who aren't aware, the ICFP contest has been going on for over ten years. It's a general programming contest (read: use whatever language you want, functional or otherwise), intended for teams, and it lasts 3 days. Winners get bragging rights, and "prize money to help defray the costs of travel to the conference for the winners as well as small cash prizes" (the conference itself[2] is in Edinburgh, UK, in late August/early September).<br><br>Past contests have involved building virtual machines (e.g., in 2006 to run a VM image that you then had to hack, in 2007 to do image processing on alien "dna"), writing simple AIs for small agents (e.g., last year involved a Mars rover avoiding aliens and rocks, 2005 involved robots robbing banks and cop robots stopping them), thinking about datatypes (e.g. in 2007, lots of string processing was necessary, but the default string types for most languages weren't suited to the tasks), and generally a lot of fun, geeky humor.<br><br>I encourage anyone who likes programming enough to be on this list to at least check it out, and, ideally, to participate. Form a team with your friends or coworkers. It tends to be lots of fun, especially if it's not the sort of programming task you normally work on.<br><br>-johnnnnnn<br><br>[1] <a href="http://www.icfpcontest.org/">http://www.icfpcontest.org/</a><br>[2] <a href="http://www.icfpconference.org/">http://www.icfpconference.org/</a></body></html>