Team Road Crew

You've reached the Team Road Crew site for the ICFP '04 Programming Contest. If you would like to make a call, please hang up and try your call again...

Seriously, don't run off. Our ants did that to us a lot during the competition and I'm not sure we can take much more rejection. Tim's a pretty fragile guy.

Timothy Nordloh

Who's Tim you ask? Good question. Tim is the non Team Leader of Team Road Crew. Why isn't Tim the Team Leader? Because he wanted to make sure James got any and all spam from dropping his e-mail address in that Team Leader box. He's a pretty thoughtful guy.

Tim is a System's Administrator who enjoys the occasional programming challenge, usually at TopCoder. He's a Java fan who codes in Vi, but James tries to look past his faults. He recently received his degree in Ant Tactics and Optimization.

James Edward Gray II

What's that? Who's James? You're kind of needy, aren't you? James is the collector of spam for Team Road Crew. I feel like we already covered that.

James is a Contract Programmer. He writes Ant Simulations for fun in his spare time. Chicks dig that about him. He's a Perl guy these days, though he is Java 2 Certified. James codes on a G5 in BBEdit. He knows he's right and all other choices are wrong so there's simply no need to discuss these issues further. He also writes his own goofy web pages, so he can get away with saying things like that.

The Contest

If you don't know what the ICFP is and don't get much out of geeky programming contest sites, I'll give you the short version. Turn to page 5 in your read-along manual.

What is the ICFP? It's an acronym. That means that it's really just a shortened version of the real name, using the first letters of each word. It stands for International Conference on Functional Programming. Each year, before the conference itself, the organizers host a programming contest over the Internet. That contest is what this page is all about. Team Road Crew entered the 2004 contest.

The Task

Each year the contest involves a non trivial programming challenge contestants have 72 hours to solve, using their favorite programming language, tools, and wits. 2004's challenge was to design an intelligence for an ant colony in a specified game simulation. The goal was to gather more for food with your ants than the opposing colonies could in a tournament of all submitted intelligences. Issues like ant combat, a hex shaped world map, all ants having a kind of hive mind intelligence, and having to use a primitive language for ant instruction really added to the fun.

Dig Deeper

Well, that's the basics of where you now find yourself. If you would like to know more about our ant intelligence or the process we went through to create it, try the links below...

Contact Team Road Crew

If you would like to contact our team, you are welcome to mail James.