I spent ~40 hours solving problems for ICFPc 2024. I had a good time.
My github repo has more details on each problem https://github.com/uguu-org/icfpc2024
This page contains just the meta bits.
Every year I wondered if this would be the year I quit ICFP. This year was particularly bad, it all started when the organizers decided that the only means of communication would be via Discord. I guess that's fine since it was like that in previous years, except this year it totally didn't work. I must have solved ~20 captchas before Discord demanded a phone number from me, and I just wasn't going to give it, especially since there was no evidence that it would work. I tried again on Friday and it has gotten worse. Oh well, I usually don't ask the organizers anything anyways so maybe that's no big deal, but that was frustrating.
And then on Friday, I was hit with a power outage. Power outages in California is actually quite common and we have had at least one outage every summer, except this time it happened during ICFP contest. ICFP contest also usually take place during the summer, I guess statistically it's no surprise that a power outage would coincide with ICFP after 10+ years of it, but that was frustrating too.
After all the gripes with communication and power, there was frustration with the problem itself. This year's task involves implementing lambda expressions, which I remember as something from the 2020 contest. I remember it as the contest that I actually did gave up (notice how there was no ICFPc 2020 listed under contests). This year I persisted a bit longer, because I was afraid that if I don't evaluate these lambda expressions, they will come back to haunt me forever. It helps that the spec this year is more cleanly written, and it was possible to enjoy the contest even with a broken lambda evaluator.
After all the complaints and gripes, I still sunk ~40 hours into the contest (as usual), and placed 94th which is somewhere in the middle (as usual). All things considered, I would say this was still a fun experience.
Previous (2024-05-30): "Akazukin, Tabi no Tochuu de Shitai to Deau" by Aoyagi Aito
Next (2024-08-09): A crank-based platform game