Re:Biased! (Score 3)

I think you missed the fact that the phrase ... is the programming tool of choice for discriminating hackers is part of the first price, while the phrase is a fine programming tool for many applications is part of the second price (and "a bunch of extremely cool hackers" is for the judge's Prize). This explain why the first one is applied one year to Cilk and the next year to Ocaml.

We note that this OCaml entry beat out 23 C and C entries, many of these being highly tuned programs produced by extremely competent programmers skilled in game-playing algorithms. This is a strong statement as to the performance of compiled OCaml software.

Is it really? The games were not timed. Furthermore, we know from the nature of the contest that performance is not an issue; only winning counts. Is this just a sloppy use of language, or an unsubstantiated statement that shows again the judges' bias?

The games were timed (30s maximum by move). And, the best programs used a brute force algorithm (alpha-beta search), so speed was essential.