ICFP Contest 2017
Team "A Storm of Minds"
- Christoph Breitkopf
- Jan Dreske
Submissions
For convenience, our compiled submissions are available in the folder
submissions.
They have a small problem: The punter scripts will
only work in the current directory.
The fix is trivial.
Also, we forgot to disable logging in the lightning submission. When
run, it will create a file server.log in the current directory. This
can be safely ignored/deleted.
Strategy
We wrote several punters during the contest, mostly being extensions and refinements on the punters that came before them. We spent a lot of time on futures and splurges, but actually got lower scores with the code activated, so our final submission uses only options.
Our submitted punter tries two things:
- connect two mines
- claim the highest-scoring river connected to any we already own
Tech
Our punters are written in Java 8. We tried for functional style, but a lack of experience with JSON mapping prevented that to some extent. Also, we later rewrote some functions using streams to explicit loops for performance.
The choice of Java proved less than ideal because of the huge JVM
startup times and missing Hotspot optimizations in the 1-second
runtime limit. Also, we had some trouble respecting the runtime
limit and had to sprinkle our code with
Thread.currentThread().isInterrupted() queries.
Other:
- Groovy: offline game server. We couldn't get the OCaml version to compile
- Shell: tooling
- Haskell: another punter which was not used in the submissions
Compiling and running
The punter is built using gradle. Running
./gradlew build
in the project directory will download all dependencies, build, and run tests.
Start the punter with
java -jar build/libs/icfpc2017.jar [solver]
where solver can optionally specify the solver to use. If it's not present, we use the one we've found to be best on average.
Tools
We wrote our own offline game server. You need to have groovy installed to run it:
groovy ops/OfflineServer.groovy mapFile punter1 punter2 ...