Endo at end?

The ICFP contest has ended three hours ago. In his blog, Johan is optimistic that Endo can be saved. Looking at the scoreboard's 16+ rankings, this seems unlikely :-/

DylanHackers (the team I contributed to in some previous contests) did not do so well this time. I dropped off in the first night, reaching a stack overflow error when parsing the supplied DNA's first pattern:

13351PCCPFFP
13361PIIPICP
13371PIIPIIP
Stack space overflow: current size 8388608 bytes.
Use `+RTS -Ksize' to increase it.
13381PFFPCCP
13391PIIPICP
13401PIPIIPF
13411PIIPIIP
13421PIIPICP

Well, at least I managed to parse 1% of the DNA! (The number in front of the RNA fragment signifies the byte position where it comes from the DNA.) Ωmega, being an interpreter on top of Haskell has no efficient means of controlling stack usage, which is consumed quickly, even if my parser was written in tail-recursive style. Hmmm. I did not even bother to submit the low hanging prefix that was published in the task itself. I am really curious if any team reached a 50%+ survival probability.

In any case the task was really hard this year. On the positive side I saved myself from some frustration and had a wonderful weekend with my family. We celebrated my son's 11th birthday in a game factory and my brother visited us with wife and his two children. Sometimes you win by losing...