We normally use the carefully-defined term tacit instead of functional because we do not know of a uniformly accepted definition of the latter term. The specifications for the game are available at the contest website.
Evaluation functions are dyadic.
It is instructive to consider evcount in detail. Benchmarks performed on our machines and extrapolated onto the contest machine indicated that 30 seconds are sufficient to execute the evaluation function, without any need for timer interrupts or multi-processor execution. This strategy was sufficient to play surprisingly well. Work would have proceeded rapidly, but time ran out, alas. Intermediate stages of the code were distributed as e-mail attachments.