> What you are saying sounds interesting but very vague.

Yes, it is vague. This was 20 years ago.

> Do you have any more details?

If you read the text carefully, and strip it of the "we were so awesome and those idiots didn't understand just how awesome we were" you can actually see quite a bit of what I was saying in the text itself.

For example: "... neither [of the authors] attended the kickoff meeting at NSWC". So it's not entirely surprising if (as I suggest), they weren't fully aware of the actual purpose [especially if, as the other paper suggests, there were relevant discussions that preceded the kickoff meeting].

Or the following: 'One observer described the solution as “cute but not extensible” (para-phrasing); this comment slipped its way into an initial draft of the final report, which described the Haskell prototype as being “too cute for its own good”'

Again, the authors frame this as the judges not understanding how wonderful their solution was, i.e. "everybody else is an idiot". Well, maybe everyone else isn't an idiot, and maybe the evaluation had something to do with not really contributing to the actual software-architectural purpose, which in turn had something to do with the authors not being there for the kickoff meeting?

Of course, I wasn't there either, but this sure is what it looks like to me.

Here is another paper, which talks more about the original problem and purpose of the competition, which was to be a sample problem (with sample solutions) for software architecture:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/able/ftp/aegis-iwssd8/a...

I remember seeing a more comprehensive report, which also had larger code samples and talked about the disqualifications, but I can't seem to find it right now.