Once again, it's time for the ICFP Programming Contest. This year it looked like I'd have a totally free weekend. Mom took the youngest on an Elder Hostel trip for a week, the eldest is in Ohio with other Grandma looking at a college, and the middle kids arranged to sleep over. My wife decided to go to the casinos at Bossier City with her brother.

ChrisMcDonough, hathawsh, and I set up a CVS repository and TeamSpeak server. The problem was to optimize a series of commands to a simulated race car on ten different tracks. Friday night and Saturday we spent writing the peculiar fixed-point math library needed by the problem, and creating a simulator in PyGame. We managed to get a lightning entry in by manually driving the car around several of the tracks. Our plan was to hand-pick a set of waypoints on each track, interpolate them using cubic splines to make a smooth path, then get the car to more-or-less follow the path.

Right after the lightning submission, Grandma and Grandson returned, and Sunday was a lost cause between chemo tiredness and family obligations. In the end, we had a rather nice path editor, with draggable waypoints, etc., but no working path-follower. Our final submission was a complete set of manually driven traces :-P.