how Revolution did in programming contest: 82nd percentile

[Dave LeYanna]

VERY nice... 

Dave

-----Original Message-----
From: use-revolution-bounces at lists.runrev.com
[mailto:use-revolution-bounces at lists.runrev.com] On Behalf Of Dar Scott
Sent: Monday, September 20, 2004 10:42 PM
To: How to use Revolution
Subject: how Revolution did in programming contest: 82nd percentile

The results are in!

    http://www.cis.upenn.edu/proj/plclub/contest//index.php

Back in June my son and I entered a programming contest.  He was a
strategist and I did the Transcript programming.

We got a very late start, but had a world simulator going for the lightning
division written in Revolution.  We created an ant brain by hand on a big
sheet of paper and keyed that in.  Our two entries placed
57 and 58 out of 87 entries in the lightning division, pretty good for
starting almost half way though the lightning division's 24 hours.  
Notice that most of the teams did not have an entry for the lightning
division; only 52 out of 230 teams had an entry ready for the lightning
division.  Only a dozen languages were represented.

We did well for the main division.  For the main division, we cleaned up the
world simulator and created an ant-brain compiler using Revolution.  As we
approached the end (just three hours to go) we had some cool ideas but I
wimped out and entered what we had, thinking we were going to crash (we
people).  I now think we should have done it.  
Also, that would have exploited some Transcript features.  (For some reason
the "ant [brain] size" is wrong for our entries on the web pages; I think we
generated files that the competition player liked, but the line counter did
not.  Too long of comments, I guess.)  We came in 65th out of 361.  We were
allowed to enter two, and we threw in an older ugly one, but it didn't do as
well.

Ours was the only entry in any Xtalk.

The prize winners' languages were 1) Objective Caml, 2) a mix of Java, 
C++, Perl & M4, 3) Haskell and 4) C++.

In the main division we beat all the Basic, Pascal, Erlang, Smalltalk and
tcl entries as well as others.  That may not say much; they had few entries.

We beat most of the Objective C, Perl, Python, Lisp, Scheme, ML, Ruby,
Haskell, Java, C-variant* entries.

Our team was smaller than most teams up where we placed, so we are pleased.

Dar


* C++, C, D and C# taken as a whole

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     Dar Scott Consulting
     http://www.swcp.com/dsc/
     Programming Services
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