Ocaml's Razor
Nono
(friend of Ulysses)
This page describes our entry for the
ICFP Programming Contest 2002.
Who are we?
Our team is the following:
We are all french post-doc's (we are also called the "french invaders") in the
Programming
Logic Group of the Department of
Computer Science of the
Chalmers University of
Technology, at Göteborg, in Sweden. We are all coming from the
LogiCal project at
INRIA-Rocquencourt, in France.
The team and robot names
The name of our team is related to fact that we used
Ocaml as a programming language and refers
also to Occam's razor. Occam's (or Ockham's) razor is a principle attributed to
the 14th century logician and Franciscan friar, William of Occam. Ockham was
the village in the English county of Surrey where he was born. The original
principle states that:
"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate"
"Frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora"
"Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem"
If you don't remember your latin lessons, this mainly means that "Entities
should not be multiplied unnecessarily". This fits perfectly with our
philosophy which is: "in 3 days, you only have time to code what is necessary".
Regarding the name of our robot, some of us were (and are always) fans of the
french-japanese manga
Ulysses 31, which was
diffused in France (on FR3) in the 80's. It's a revisited and (very) modern
version of Homer's
Odyssey. In the story, it is the thirty-fist century. Ulysses kills Cyclops
when he rescued the children and his son, Telemachus. But the ancient gods of
Olympus are angry and threaten a terrible revenge... Ulysses is sentenced to
travel through the universe of Olympus with a frozen crew on a quest to find
the Kingdom of Hades. Only when he has found the Kingdom of Hades will his crew
be free of their curse and he will be able to return to Earth and to his
beloved Penelope. Nono is Telemachus's robot. He makes his debut by bursting
forth from Telemachus's birthday cake in the pilot episode "Vengeance of the
Gods". From that point on the two make an inseparable pair. You can find a
photo of Nono in the left-upper corner of this page. Isn't he so cute?
What programming language?
As said previously, we used Ocaml (version
3.04). Yes, we know, Chalmers should mean Haskell, but again, as said
previously, we are french and we are far to be Haskell-maniacs. To avoid any
Haskeller pression, we simply locked our office and as Astérix (a french comic)
in the village, we kept the place during these 3 days. At the end of the
contest, a swedish guy came in the office and had a look at our robot, which
delivered his packages. He was really impressed and told us: "Wow, that's cool,
especially if we think that you made it in Ocaml!". Hum, no comment.
The code
We entered the contest in both divisions (lightning and normal), you can
download our entries here:
Further information
We will provide very soon additional information regarding our algorithms, as
well as the code of the graphical server we implemented to test Nono. Some
screenshots will be also available.
Last modified: Wed Sep 4 21:21:26 MET DST 2002