25 Sep 08 ICFP programming contest

This July I (together with and 3 other people - Janto Dreijer, Pieter Holtzhausen and Albert Swart) entered a team in the ICFP programming contest.

The problem was to navigate a robotic rover though some alien terrain, while avoiding rocks, craters and evil martians. We wrote everything in Python, and tried several different approaches but in the end settled on a simple obstacle avoidance algorithm. Given that the martians in the sample server were not very smart we ignored them for the first run, and only start active avoidance if we see more than 5 of them at the same time.

I think our solution in the end was pretty decent. Our entry of AntiCylonDefenseTeamImpersonator actually ended in first place in the initial round. (though to be fair, we did share that spot with 18 other teams ) In the end we dropped out at round 4, apparently our rover crashed into a crater. (though through our own testing we cannot duplicate that..)