| Year |
Organiser |
Description |
| 1998 |
Université de Montréal and Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Write a program that plays pousse, an odd variant of tic-tac-toe. Contestant programs were entered into a tournament to determine the first- and second-place program. |
| 1999 |
Harvard University |
Size-optimize case statements (the contest task spoke about text-based adventure games, but in fact the task was to size-optimize the description of such a game). |
| 2000[6] |
Cornell University |
Implement a ray tracer using a Postscript-like syntax. |
| 2001[7] |
INRIA Rocquencourt |
Size-optimize an HTML-like markup language by removing unnecessary whitespace and tags, and so on. |
| 2002[8] |
OGI School of Science and Engineering |
Implement robots playing a Sokoban-like game one against each other. |
| 2003[9] |
Chalmers University |
Implement robots driving a car as fast as possible through different racing tracks. |
| 2004 |
University of Pennsylvania |
Design an ant colony that will bring the most food particles back to its anthill, while fending off ants of another species. The contest entry would output a state-machine description of the ant: in principle, entries could have been written by hand. Later the task was adapted into Ant Wars, a strategy and programming game where each participant is a species of ant. The participants then, in a language called Antomata,[10] program a finite-state machine to function as the brain of each ant. The ant brain then controls the ant to find and collect food to bring to the home ant hill, to fend off attackers or make trails of pheromones. |
| 2005[11] |
PLT group |
Implement "bots" for a "Cops & Robbers" game: contestants have to write the control program that guides a Robber-Bot through a quiet urban neighborhood on a mission to rob every bank without getting caught, and the control program for a Cop-Bot dedicated to stopping it. |
| 2006[12] |
Carnegie Mellon University |
Implement a virtual machine that runs an operating system (called UMIX) provided by the judges, and crack it using new programming languages with unconventional syntax and semantics, such as 2D and a version of BASIC using Roman numerals. Many puzzles were tiny versions or parodies of previous contests. |
| 2007[13] |
Utrecht University |
Implement a 2-stage virtual machine that executes a DNA-like string to produce an image. Then, given an input string for this machine, find a prefix that when added to this string yields an image as close as possible to the given target image. |
| 2008[14] |
Portland State University and the University of Chicago |
Provide a Mars rover control system that will guide it to a home base while avoiding obstacles and enemies. |
| 2009[15] |
University of Kansas |
Control a satellite to move between specified orbits and rendezvous with other satellites. |
| 2010 |
Leipzig University of Applied Science, Germany |
International Car and Fuel Production. |
| 2011[16] |
Tohoku University, Japan |
Program a computer with 256 "slots" to outlast its opponent in terms of slots remaining at the end of the match. Submissions include executables that are entered into a two-phase tournament. |
| 2012[17] |
University of St Andrews, Scotland |
Program an AI for a Boulder Dash-like game. |
| 2013[18] |
Microsoft Research |
Guess the implementation of a blackbox function implemented in a simple functional language through querying a web service. |
| 2014[19] |
University of Oxford and Well-Typed LLP |
Write AI programs for a pacman like game, in SECD machine instruction for pacman and 8-bit machine assembly instructions for four ghosts. |
| 2015[20] |
Galois |
Write an AI for Tetris-like game on a hexagon grid field that embeds secret phrases in the move sequence. |
| 2016[21] |
University of Electro-Communications |
Write an AI to solve abstract origami. |
| 2017[22] |
University of Edinburgh |
Write an AI for a game where players in turn claim route parts on the map and the one with the best coverage wins. There are also three extensions to the main game mode, any number of which can be enabled on a map. |
| 2018[23] |
Rochester Institute of Technology |
Generate nanobot traces to construct, destruct, and reconstruct target 3D objects while minimizing energy used. |
| 2019[24] |
Yale-NUS College and National University of Singapore |
Worker-Wrappers against Bit Rot.[25]
The task is to program a robot called a worker-wrapper to efficiently wrap the entire accessible surface of a mine, transforming it into a safe storage site for obsolete software. The robot moves across a grid-based map, using its manipulators to wrap surface squares, while navigating around obstacles and utilizing collected boosters to improve efficiency. Players must generate a sequence of actions—such as moving, turning, or using boosters like extended manipulators, fast wheels, or a drill—to complete the wrapping in minimal time. Solutions are scored based on the time taken relative to the best solution, with shorter wrapping times yielding higher scores. |
| 2020[26] |
SKB Kontur |
Build virtual machine by the alien specification, run alien provided game-server on that VM, explore the game (2D space battle on the planet orbit with Chebyshev distance, with accelerate, shoot, split and detonate commands), reverse engineer game-protocol and create bot to play this game. |
| 2021[27] |
Alex Lang and Jasper Van der Jeugt |
Manipulate a 2D stick figure, where vertices are connected by flexible edges, to fit through a polygonal hole as in the "Brain Wall" game show. The goal is to minimize the sum of squared distances from each hole vertex to the nearest figure vertex ("dislikes"), while respecting physical constraints on edge stretching. Special bonuses can be unlocked by placing vertices at specific locations, allowing relaxed rules such as breaking edges or global stretch tolerance. |
| 2022[28] |
Alperen Keles |
Develop algorithms for robotic painters tasked with transforming an initial canvas into a target image using a sequence of geometric and color operations. The core problem involved manipulating rectangular blocks on a 2D canvas through five types of moves—line cut, point cut, color, swap, and merge—each with an associated cost based on block size and operation type. Participants submitted programs in an Instruction Set Language (ISL), aiming to minimize the total cost while maximizing visual similarity to the target painting, measured via pixel-wise RGBA differences. |
| 2023[29] |
Aymeric Fromherz |
Optimize the placement of musicians on a stage to maximize audience enjoyment. Each attendee has individual musical preferences, and their happiness depends on the proximity to and volume of musicians playing their preferred instruments, while sound can be blocked by other musicians or obstacles like pillars. The task involves solving a complex spatial optimization problem under physical and geometric constraints. Additional extensions introduce factors such as musician collaboration effects and adjustable volume levels to further refine the performance quality. |
| 2024[30] |
Jeroen Bransen, Matúš Tejiščák, Bas den Heijer, Emiel Bransen, Aymeric Fromherz |
The contect centered around a custom functional language called ICFP, based on lambda calculus and serialized in a compact ASCII format. Participants submitted programs that evaluated to specific string outputs, solving a series of increasingly complex challenges. The contest featured four main problem types: "lambdaman" (pathfinding in mazes with size-optimized code), "spaceship" (trajectory control via thrust manipulation), "3d" (programming in a 2D grid-based language with time-travel semantics), and "efficiency" (analyzing and evaluating deeply nested programs, often requiring symbolic reasoning or SAT solvers). |
| 2025[31] |
Liam O’Connor, Jack Stodart |
Develop algorithms to map a labyrinthine library composed of rooms with six doors by planning exploratory expeditions. Teams must submit route plans to navigate the library and collect partial information about room labels, recorded as 2-bit values. The goal is to reconstruct the entire layout as an undirected graph using as few expeditions as possible. |