Contests

2015

To be announced, August 7 2015.
2014, University of Oxford

Lambda-Man - Implement AI for a Pac-Man clone. The Lambda-Man AI runs on a lisp machine CPU, and the ghosts run on an 8-bit microcontroller.
2013, RiSE, Microsoft

\BV - Given an unknown function F(x) which maps 64bit integers to 64bit integers, sample outputs of F to guess the function.
2012

Lambda Lifter - Dig through the earth to collect Lambdas, but watch out for falling rocks and other dangers!
2011 Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan

Lambda: The Gathering - Play a card game, where the cards are lambda-calculus functions and combinators.
2010, Fakultät Informatik, Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften; Hochschule für Technik, Wirtschaft und Kultur, Leipzig

International Car and Fuel Production - Design car engines and fuels, and post them to a realtime market to earn points.
2009, The University of Kansas

Operation Clear Skies - Pilot an orbiter to dock with various pieces of space debris, and change their orbits to reach other orbiting bodies.
2008, Portland State University and University of Chicago

Mars Rover - Drive a Mars rover from its current location to home base, avoiding craters and martians.
2007, Utrecht

Save Endo - Reprocess alien DNA to convert a source image to a target image.
2006, CMU

Universal Machine - Implement a bytecode VM, and boot into an ancient OS to solve more algorithmic challenges.
2005, PLT and friends

Cops & Robbers - Write AI for Cops (hunt a robber) and Robbers (rob banks). Cops from multiple teams come together to hunt a single Robber.
2004, Penn

Dinner with Ambiants - Design an ant colony that successfully gathers food, and defends its nest from other intruders.
2003, Chalmers
2002, OGI
2001, INRIA Rocquencourt

SML/NG - Optimize a variant of XHTML.
2000, Cornell and Bell Labs

GML - Implement a ray tracer.
1999, Harvard and Virginia

Given a state machine representing a character in an interactive fiction as an s-expression, write an optimizer to losslessly compress the state machine for various measurements of cost.
1998, Universite de Montreal and MIT