The ICFP Programming Contest 2012 is the 15th instance of the annual programming contest series sponsored by The ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming. This year, the contest starts at 12:00 July 13 Friday UTC and ends at 12:00 July 16 Monday UTC. There will be a lightning division, ending at 12:00 July 14 Saturday UTC.

The task description will be published here when the contest starts. Solutions to the task must be submitted online before the contest ends. Details of the submission procedure will be announced along with the contest task.

This is an open contest. Anybody may participate except for the contest organisers and members of the same group as the the contest chairs. No advance registration or entry fee is required.

Any programming language(s) may be used as long as the submitted program can be run by the judges on a standard Linux environment with no network connection. Details of the judges’ environment will be announced later.

There will be cash prizes for the first and second place teams, the team winning the lightning divison, and a discretionary judges’ prize. There may also be travel support for the winning teams to attend the conference. (The prizes and travel support are subject to the budget plan of ICFP 2012 pending approval by ACM.)

In addition, the organisers will declare during the conference that:

the first place team’s language is “the programming language of choice for discriminating hackers”,

the second place team’s language is “a fine tool for many applications”,

the winning lightning division team’s language is “very suitable for rapid prototyping”, and

the team winning the judges’ prize is “an extremely cool bunch of hackers”.

Additional announcements will be made at http://icfpcontest.org/, including

the rules and details of the task.

The contest organisers are: Kevin Hammond (co-chair), Edwin Brady (co-chair), Brian Campbell, Sam Lindley, Robert Atkey and Sam Elliott.