I'm disappointed their judging environment is a single core. Multiple cores are becoming increasingly important these days, and with more and more functional languages supporting parallel programming, it's a shame that those languages won't be able to show off their full capabilities on this highly parallelizable task.

There has been discussion about this already - Kevin Hammond makes his case here: http://icfpcontest2012.wordpress.com/2012/07/05/judging-envi...

Weird to see the cost excuse in there, since the cost of judging 100 teams on 100 maps for 3 minutes each on 1Ghz 1GB-RAm machines is 30,000 minutes = 500hrs < $50 on EC2 small machines

One team is livestreaming their work on a youtube live stream.

See this thread for the details: http://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/wgk0k/live_coding_icfp...

I wish the site made it more clear what ICFP was, without having to Google it. I had no idea!