Speech by Bart Demoen on 29 November 2001, during the ICLP-CC banquet. ====================================================================== I am here to tell you about the 7th Prolog Programming Contest. I have organised it 8 times since 1994 and it was great as usual. First some words of thanks: thank you Tony Kakas for giving the contest a well equiped computer room and an excellent time slot in the conference program thank you Maria Tsolakis for doing the installation of several Prolog systems on the machines thank you Phuong-Lan Nguyen for the help in preparing this contest beforehand: specifying the questions and trying to solve them as well The setup of the contest is that teams try to solve 5 problems in 2 hours. The teams are handicapped: first because a team has 3 members; secondly because each team gets only one paper copy of the problems; in the third place because each team can use only one machine/keyboard. Individual members of teams - or people who try to find excuses for not participating - claim often other handicaps: they haven't programmed for many years, they don't know Prolog, they have a broken finger and can't type, the have a jet lag ... Anyway, we had 12 teams - 36 people - competing and that is good ! Amongst them several former winners of this contest: Kostis Sagonas (1998), Michael Maher (I forgot) and the unavoidable Peter Stuckey who won this contest even three times - but I can already say that he lost this time ! And the crowd here in the banquet contains also a few former winners: Tony Kusalik, Slim Abdennadher who didn't dare to defend their honour. I always learn something from a contest, there is always something new, but there is also something very much the same: as soon as these participants - and remember, they are professors, teaching assistants and respected researchers - as soon as these participants get the questions, they start behaving like first year students: running around nervously, stuttering speach, blushing when they ask for clarification, suddely they can't read properly anymore and they try to lure me into giving some hints away. This time I actually looked at the programs that were handed in. Here is what I saw: the XSB team, people from Stony Brook molded by another former winner David S. Warren, and really consisting of 4 people (the cheaters !) solved the mqueens problem using tabling; the Swedish team (with one Greek and one Austrian) solved the same problem using constraints. But the shortest mqueens solution was in plain Prolog by the Flemish-Dutch team. Gopal Gupta certainly won the first price for proudness: he believes his cross solution to be the most elegant. Also Jostis Sagonas must have been very proud of his program: he submitted it about a dozen times. The Spanish CIAO team and the HAL team used assert for one problem and the Swedish team even twice. The ECLiPSe team needed cut (!/0) only three times, while the Swedish team and the Flemish-Dutch team used it 18 times ! And finally: the average length of variable names (in number of characters) is about 1.01 ... 5 teams out of 12 used SICStus Prolog, 3 teams preferred SWI Prolog, and then ECLiPSe, XSB, CIAO and GNU-Prolog were used by one team each. 2 teams solved nothing: they didn't even bother to submit anything. Hey, do not laugh: the real loosers of this contest are the people who did not participate. 4 teams solved 1 problem; 4 teams solved 2. The Spanish CIAO team had even a serious go at 4 problems, but got stuck on 2. So we had two teams with 3 correct solutions: the XSB team with Luis Castro, Samik, Basu, C.R. and I.V.; and the Flemish-Dutch team with Henk Vandecasteele, Bert Van Nuffelen and Jan Wielemaker. The contest rules then dictate that the total time taken for solving the problems decides on the winning team. The XSB team needed 288 minutes and the Flemish-Dutch team needed 28 minutes ... less, and so they are the winners. Please step up here you guys and get your prizes: a t-shirt with the logo of the conference and the mentioning in pseudo-Greek that the won the contest; and a certificate stating the same. Congratulations. There will be a contest next year in Copenhagen at ICLP'02 and I hope to see you there. Postscript: The above is as close to the speech as possible - but I have corrected at least one speech bug :-)