[Icfp04-discuss] why we, the organizers, did not provide a simulator

[Michael Levin]

Hi All,

Thank you for your participation in the contest; it was a lot of fun!

Several participants suggested that we should have included a
simulator with our task specification. We DID consider this and
decided against it for the following reasons:

*) A source implementation would favor a particular source
   language -- not good;

*) A binary distribution would favor a particular platform or
   else we would have to support multiple platforms -- we did not
   have the resources to do it;

*) A web interface would probably be too computationally heavy
   for our hardware to handle; besides, this would be a limited
   simulator that would not be very useful;

*) Some participants actually found writing the simulator and
   visualizer enjoyable;

*) There were more good reasons, but I forget...

Michael