This is an English translation of the AFUL press release which can be
found at http://www.aful.org/presse/cp-icfp.html.

A team from INRIA-Rocquencourt wins the ICFP Programming Contest
with an Objective Caml program.

The ICFP Programming contest was organized for the second year in a row
in parallel with the International Conference on Functional
Programming (ICFP), which took place this year in Paris. The contest
consisted in writing a program solving a particular problem, in 72
hours with no restrictions on the programming language. Programs
submitted were compared according to criteria specified in advance,
and prizes were attributed to the winners during a special session of
the conference.

Pascal Cuoq, Damien Doligez, Xavier Leroy, Luc Maranget and Alan
Schmitt, researchers and PhD students within the Cristal and Para
projects of INRIA-Rocquencourt, were the members of the team "Camls 'R
Us" which realized in less than 72 hours a program which successfully
passed all tests of this year's contest. The problem consisted in
writing an optimizer for a decision tree. The optimizer had to output
a result semantically equivalent to the input tree, optimized for
size.

The submissions, as many as 38 with some submitted in less than 24
hours, were written in languages as different as C, C++, Haskell,
several variants of ML including Objective Caml, Scheme, Perl, Python,
Icon, and even a typed assembly language named TAL. Among these, one
was quickly eliminated after attempting to attack the contest
computer, and the TAL entry was noticed for trying to produce results
of size slightly over 2^32, relying on an arithmetic overflow
to obtain smaller results than its contenders. This last entry,
written by a team from Cornell University, was awarded the "Joker
prize" by the jury for its cleverness.

The special prize of the jury was awarded to Lennart Augustsson
(Chalmers, Sweden) for a 357 lines long Haskell program --including
comments--, realized in less than 24 hours, which obtained very
good results. Lennart Augustsson was deemed an "extremely cool
hacker" by the jury for this achievement.

Many submissions were eliminated because they output wrong results, or
no result at all. At the penultimate stage of the contest, 21 programs
were still competing. 8 of them went to the final stage, including the
submission from the Camls 'R us team, which obtained the best score on
each one of the test inputs used to rank the finalists.

The Camls 'R us submission did not only achieve an excellent
optimization ratio, but it also checked the output tree for semantic
correctness by means of randomized tests, and kept the best version so
far so that it always could output something correct before the 30
minutes deadline.

The Objective Caml language was declared to be the "programming language
of choice for discriminating hackers" by the jury.