Rules

The ICFP Programming Contest 2012 is the 15th instance of the annual programming contest series sponsored by The ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming.  This year, the contest starts at  12:00 July 13 Friday UTC and ends at 12:00 July 16 Monday UTC. There will be a lightning division, ending at 12:00 July 14 Saturday UTC.

• This is an open contest. Anybody may participate except for the contest organizers and members of the same laboratory as the the contest chairs.
• Any programming language(s) may be used as long as the submitted program can be run by the judges on a standard Linux environment with no network connection.
• There can only be one submission per team but submissions can be updated freely up to the end of the contest; later submissions override earlier ones. Submission requirements will be published along with the task.
• Participants may form teams. A team consists of every person who contributes ideas and/or code towards a submission. Individuals may only be members of a single team and teams may not divide or collaborate with each other once the contest has begun.
• There is a limit of 20 contestants per team; all contestants must register using EventBrite
• Submissions must run under the standard Linux virtual machine that will be notified by the organisers
• Entries submitted after the competition end date/time are invalid
• Any team attempting to gain an unfair advantage will be immediately disqualified from the competition and publicly declared to be “an uncool bunch of dudes”
• The judges’ decision on all matters is final. There is no right of appeal.

There will be cash prizes for the first place team, the team winning the lightning divison, and a discretionary judges’ prize. There will also be travel support for the winning teams to attend the conference.

In addition, the organisers will declare during the conference that:

• the first place team’s language is “the programming language of choice for discriminating hackers”,
• the second place team’s language is “a fine tool for many applications”,
• the winning lightning division team’s language is “very suitable for rapid prototyping”, and
• the team winning the judges’ prize is “an extremely cool bunch of hackers”.