AITEC NEWS No.20
 |
January 13, 1999 |
Issue #20
(issued on December 16, 1998 in Japanese) |
Introduction
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We are delighted to announce the award winners of the KLIC Programming Contest
in 1998 in this special issue.
This is the third contest since the contest started in 1996. For this year's
contest, we set three categories to encourage more applicants to try
programming in KL1 with KLIC. Have you tried writing any programs?
The Cyber Award Ceremony will be announced on the AITEC Homepage soon,
where you can access the winners' programs, judges' comment and so on at:
http://www.icot.or.jp/
In this issue, we report on the judging process and other interesting aspects
of the contest.
(Makiko Sato)
1. Outline of the Contest
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The KLIC Programming Contest is intended to promote KL1 and KLIC (the parallel
logic language and its programming environment) developed in the FGCS (Fifth
Generation Computer Systems) project.
The contest has provided an exciting chance to compete using parallel
programming skills in KL1, and we issued a public appeal for applicants in
the journal of the Information Processing Society of Japan, several other
magazines and on our homepage.
We had hoped that more applicants would participate in this year's contest,
for last year we only attracted 18 applicants in total partly because the
subjects were relatively difficult. We discussed how to entice more people to
participate, and decided not only to make the subject easier but also more
interesting for applicants. We thus chose the following three categories:
- Entry Category: for novice KL1 users
- Speed Category: for KL1 experts to compete their programming skills
- Idea Category: for anyone wishing to program freely
In the entry category, participants merely had to write a correct program,
and prizes worth \20,000 were given to 50 nominees selected by lottery,
except for those nominees who had won in previous contests.
For the speed and idea category, we prepared first and second prizes as well
as an honorable mention with supplementary prize as in the previous contests.
2. Subject Selection Process and Application Numbers
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When selecting the subjects for the entry and speed categories, we were
careful not to make them too difficult, too easy, nor violate any IPR.
We, specially, would like to thank the Tiger Electronic, Inc.(for Lights Out)
and the NIKOLI Inc.(for Skeleton Contest) for their kind cooperation.
It was difficult to choose appropriate subjects for each category. For the
entry category, we looked for one that was relatively easy and enjoyable to
solve, and chose "Lights Out." For the speed category, it took longer for
the committee to decide the subject. The working group (temporarily set up
for deciding the speed category subject) kept searching until early July, and
finally chose "Skeleton Contest."
We wrote sample programs to evaluate the programming difficulty for each
subject in each category. The "Skeleton Contest" in the speed category was
actually more difficult than expected, so we were concerned that participants
would hesitate to enter it. Waiting for applications seemed like an eternity!
On the day of the application deadline, we were pleased to have received
applications as follows:
- Entry Category: 75 applications
- Speed Category: 8 applications
- Idea Category : 2 applications
3.Decision of the Award Nominees
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On December 2, 1998, the committee met to decide award nominees. The committee
deliberated for 2 hours for the speed and idea categories, based on the
reports of the program test members, and then chose the nominees. For the
entry category, we carefully selected the nominees by lottery. The following
nominees were chosen in each category.
[Entry Category]
Subject: Lights Out
Out of 66 correct programs (excluding ones who had received prizes in the
previous contest among 74 programs), we carefully selected 50 nominees by
lottery. Contestants were from the following organizations (in alphabetical
order).
- Ehime University
- Fukuyama University
- Hitotsubashi University
- Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
- Keio University
- Kyoto University
- Nippon Institute of Technology
- Ritsumeikan University
- Science University of Tokyo
- Suzuka National College of Technology
- The University of Tokyo
- Tokyo Institute of Technology
- The University of Electro-Communications
- Waseda University
- Others(researcher)
[Speed Category]
Subject: Skeleton Contest
First prize: Yoshimasa TSURUOKA, Graduate School of Engineering
The University of Tokyo
Second prize: Yoichi KONO, Others (Researcher)
Hideaki KURITA, Department of Computer Science,
The University of Electro-Communications
Shigeki FUKUTA, Graduate School of Engineering,
The University of Tokyo
Takumi OUCHI, Graduate School of Engineering,
The University of Tokyo
Honorable mention: Norio KATO, Department of Information & Computer Science,
School of Science & Engineering,
Waseda University
Kazuki HYOUDO, Department of Computer Science,
The University of Electro-Communications
[Idea Category]
First prize: N.A.
Second prize with encouragement prize*: KLIjava/KL1 to Java compiler
Satoshi KURAMOCHI,Graduate School of
Science & Engineering, Waseda University
Honorable mention: pnmcon/graphic data conversion program
Shigeki FUKUTA, Graduate School of Engineering,
The University of Tokyo
*The judges decided to award Mr. Kuramochi an encouragement prize in addition
to his second prize because his KLIjava was of excellent quality and to
encourage him to improve the program.
4. Conclusion
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We have worked hard to make the KLIC Programming Contest popular in order to
promote KL1 and KLIC. We would have liked to continue the contest and used our
3 years' experience to make it more interesting, but unfortunately this was
the final contest by AITEC.
We sincerely thank all the participants, the KLIC programming contest
committee and the KLIC Task Group members, and the contest staff for their
eager support of the contest.
If another contest is held in the future, we hope to meet again to work
together for the contest and KLIC.
(KLIC Programming Contest Administrative Office)
**********************************************************************
* *
* A I T E C N E W S Issue #20 *
* AITEC NEWS Editorial Team: *
* Makiko Sato, Chie Takahashi, Akira Aiba *
* Kazumi Kasai, Kouichi Takeda, Yoshiharu Torii *
* Hiroshi Sato, Shunichi Uchida *
* AITEC NEWS English Version Team: *
* Masayo Fukushima, Shunichi Uchida *
* Issued on: December 16, 1998 (Japanese Version) *
* January 13, 1999 (English Version) *
* By: Research Institute for Advanced Information *
* Technology (AITEC), a subcenter of *
* Japan Information Processing Development *
* Center (JIPDEC) *
* 2-3-3, Minato-ku, Shiba, Tokyo 105-0013, Japan *
* TEL: +81-3-3456-3191 FAX: +81-3-3455-4877 *
* E-mail: aitec-news@icot.or.jp *
* http://www.icot.or.jp *
* *
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