[icfp-announce] New Contest Materials

[Dan Licata]

As we near the half-way point of the contest, we have some exciting
news!

SANDmark
********

We have just learned from our friends in the Computational
Archaeolinguistics Institute of another scroll that may be of interest
to some participants.  The scroll is titled "SANDmark," and it appears
to serve two purposes:

- It includes a more comprehensive self-checking suite than the original
  codex; this may be useful to participants who are still working on the
  UM.  

- All participants may enjoy using it to benchmark UM performance.

http://www.boundvariable.org/sandmark.umz

For your reference, the output of running SANDmark can be found on the
Web page:

http://www.boundvariable.org/sandmark-output.txt


Codex: Volume 8
***************

We have corrected several transcription errors that were present in the
original version of the codex:

* The ants simulator (in 'gardener') no longer accepts solutions that do
  not match the puzzle's pattern.  As part of this transcription error,
  two letters in the publication name were inadvertently flipped.  We
  will remove all ANTOM publications from the scoreboard.  Please rerun
  your solutions with the new codex to generate equivalent ANTWO
  publications.

* The 2d parser (in 'ohmega') gracefully rejects the ill-formed programs
  mentioned on the Web site.  Additionally, we have removed some
  spurious parentheses from the specification.

* The fourth and sixth examples in the balance specification (in 'yang')
  have been corrected.

* There were several minor typographical changes, including item
  descriptions in adventure (in 'howie').

Additionally, the codex now incorporates a less verbose version of the
newly-discovered self checks.

This codex can be distinguished from the previous by the following
 criteria:
(1) After decryption, it will print 

 == CBV ARCHIVE ==
    VOLUME ID 8

(2) The size of the decompressed UM binary is 15923864 bytes

The corrected codex is available on the Web:

http://www.boundvariable.org/codex.umz


Professor Bovik thanks you for all your hard work so far.

The Contest Organizers