What problem does it solve? Designing or shrinking Littleman (.man) programs for ICFPC 2026 is hard because the score formula max(w,h)^2 x avg_ticks punishes both area and time, and the effective optimization techniques are non-obvious. This Skill distills the empirically verified design laws and layout idioms extracted from reading every top-scoring team submission, so you stop guessing and apply techniques that are already proven on the official scorer. ## Core Features & Use Cases - Eight measured design laws (L1-L8): output pipes must be 2 cells, H can be skipped via wall-crash termination, walking replaces loops via pipe banks, one send pipe per room, pipes as primary memory, blocking as free synchronization, density as a headroom metric, and fixed-cost measurement via minimal test cases. - Concrete layout and memory idioms: boustrophedon folding of straight-line code, serpentine pipes as large FIFOs, parallel 2-cell pipe bundles as register files, pipe fill-level as a counter via q, ring pipes as drum memory, and grid-embedded constants. - Control-flow compression: XOR+X equality branching in 2 cells, x+] bit-serial unrolling, d/a loop direction selection, S broadcast bus, U receive-and-reverse, and multi-man parallelization. - Use Case: When your .man solution seems unshrinkable, measure its density (L7); if below 80%, apply the pipe-bank and serpentine-FIFO restructuring idioms, then verify topology with lman check and per-case ticks with lman test. ## Quick Start Ask the assistant to review your .man file using the littleman compaction idioms and suggest footprint and tick reductions.
