FAQs

General enquiries

  • Q: How can teams stay informed of updates during the contest?

  • A: The contest website is the authoritative source of contest information. Noteworthy updates will be added as posts to the main homepage and tweeted by @icfpcontest2019.

  • Q: How can teams contact the contest organisers during the contest?

  • A: Teams are welcome to send enquiries to icfpcontest2019@gmail.com or ask questions by sending tweets to @icfpcontest2019 (although the latter might be responded with some delays).

  • Q: What will teams be required to submit during the contest?

  • A: The exact details of contest submissions will be announced at the start of the contest.

  • Q: Will teams be required to submit source code during or after the contest?
  • A: Yes. All teams wishing to be considered for prizes must submit source code at the end of the contest.

Submissions and grading

  • Q: Does the scoring system pick the best result for each task of all submissions or the last one submitted?

  • A: Only the last submission of each team is considered when computing what the best score for a given task is. Make sure to submit your best solutions every time.

  • Q: My entire batch of solutions has been marked as failed by the server, but I’ve checked and individually some of my solutions pass the validator. What’s wrong?
  • A: It is likely to be the case due to the excessively large size of your submission. Try to reduce the size of the submitted archive: in our experience, the vast majority of full valid submissions are less than 1Mb in size.

Main task specification

  • Q: When cloning worker-wrappers, does a new replica get the same manipulators/active boosters as the original?

  • A: No, the new replica is created with no active boosters and with three default manipulators in the default position.

  • Q: How soon can a replica use a booster that is concurrently collected by another replica?

  • A: Please, refer to Appendix A of the refined Parallel Wrapping specification.

  • Q: Can a teleport beacon be used by all replicas or only by the one that installed it?
  • A: Any replica can use a teleport once it is installed.

Lambda-chain and lambda-coin mining

  • Q: How can I interact with the server if I cannot execute the provided Python scripts?
  • A: The easiest way is to use cURL to talk directly to our server, without going through the lambdad.py and lambda-cli.py. For instance:
 curl https://lambdacoin.org/lambda/getblockchaininfo
 curl https://lambdacoin.org/lambda/getmininginfo
 curl https://lambdacoin.org/lambda/getblockinfo
 curl -F 'private_id=cb70e4f12' -F 'block_num=12' -F 'solution=@task.sol' -F 'puzzle=@puzzle.desc' https://lambdacoin.org/lambda/submit
  • Q: How can I see the distribution of balances for a particular block?

  • A: You can run, for example,./lambda-cli.py getblockinfo 10 balances which will show all wallet balances awarded by the block 10.

  • Q: Our teams’ puzzle/task solution for a Lambda-chain block passed the JavaScript validation, but we did’t earn any LAM at the end of the round. How could that happen?

  • A: This means that your solution did not make it to the top-25 in order to be awarded LAM.

  • Q: Our team’s puzzle has been selected for a block N. Where our awarded 2,000 LAM are reflected?
  • A: Your team’s wallet has been debited with 2,000 LAM in addition to your regular mining reward, as per the balance shown for block N. As you cannot submit a solution for block N, your balance will be the same for block N + 1.