The 29th annual ICFP Programming Contest has launched, designed by Nolen Royalty and collaborators. A key design challenge was making the contest resistant to AI agents running autonomously. The solution is a custom 2D programming language called 'littleman,' where programs emphasize spatial reasoning — characters physically walk over instructions to execute them and exchange data via drawn pipes. The contest runs for 3 days, and a public textbook on the littleman language is available to everyone.
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