[0xab]

Years ago we had a lot of good problems. Not just 2006, but 2007 was great too where you had secret messages to save Endo. 2008 at least had you doing some fun things with the rover. 2014 you programmed a fun machine. One of the years was an optimization problem, I forgot which, but it involved orbital mechanics, so it was a lot deeper than the current setup.

In the past 5 or so years the contest has settled into a pretty boring rut. The problems are all the same. "We came up with a system that has an agent. It can do 5-15 things. Get it to solve this simple to define problem efficiently."

It's not that these problems aren't fun, it's that they're all the same :(

What's the point in doing the 10th contest in exactly the same format? It's gotten to the point where I can just reuse code from previous years.

[pwodhouse]

Aside from 2006-2008, the ramp up of complex "fun" projects, nearly all the contests were the same optimization style, often maze-solving format. Off the top of my head I remember the ant colony, the Mars Rover, the Pacman type game, the mining maze.

The oldest one I remember was an html compressor.

The real downfall of icfp is that in the past 10 years, anyone talented enough to participate is no longer merely a student or professor, but can get a job at or create their own a startup or big company or meaningful open source project of their own.

[0xab]

> merely a student or professor, but can get a job at or create their own a startup or big company or meaningful open source project of their own.

Hey! Professors do meaningful things too :)

> The real downfall of icfp is that in the past 10 years, anyone talented enough to participate

I don't think the optimization is the biggest problem. If you look at it, Endo in 2007 was "optimization", you had to find the shortest prefix to save our alien friend. But the problem had more meat to it and it was different from the problems that came before.

People are no different today than 10-20 years ago, and more good young people are created all the time who can participate. If anything, there are way more capable people that can participate today than 20 years ago.

The problems are now all the same. Why would you waste your time doing this year's problem when the problem from last year is nearly identical but with a different two-paragraph lead-in story.

Regardless of our diagnosis, the numbers bear out that the ICFP contest is slowly dying. The number of teams submitting from 2014 to 2018: 275, 230, 203, 120, 107.

We have a few more years before it's scrapped at this rate.