alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language
We built an ant colony simulation as an internal hiring challenge at Moment and decided to open it up publicly.
You write a program in a custom assembly-like (we call it ant-ssembly) instruction set that controls 200 ants. Each ant can sense nearby cells (food, pheromones, home, other ants) but has no global view. The only coordination mechanism is pheromone trails, which ants can emit and sense them, but that's it. Your program runs identically on every ant.
The goal is to collect the highest percentage of food across a set of maps. Different map layouts (clustered food, scattered, obstacles) reward very different strategies. The leaderboard is live.
Grand prize is a trip to Maui for two paid for by Moment. Challenge closes March 12.
Curious what strategies people discover. We've seen some surprisingly clever emergent behavior internally.
Comments
My "hello world" for a new stack is always a version of Worm. Somewhere between Life and your Swarm, Worm wanders around looking for food and water, trying to avoid birds and other issues. Each round the worm survives it grows by a segment. If it doesn't get food or water, it is reduced a segment. And so on. Your Swarm is a few levels up from my iterations, totally inspirational! Thanks!
I've been working on a surprisingly similar project for the last week: plants grow cells on a grid by executing a raw chunk of memory according to a simple instruction set. I'm aiming more for an evolution simulator, where each plant gets a 1kb brain that is randomized a little when a new plant is spawned.
Most plants right now settle into a simple goto loop that places the requisite cells to survive and then spam seeds until they die. I have seen some interesting variety in body plans emerge where plants sort into discrete species regionally. I'm hoping to eventually get decision making to emerge organically. If things go well this system is theoretically capable of sexual selection (and maybe fisherian runaway) but that's a pipe dream right now.
The disclosure route is cut off at the bottom: https://dev.moment.com/disclosures
I cannot scroll to the Governing Law section
This sounds a lot like a task of 2004 ICFPC Programming contest: ants, pheromone trails, only local vision, etc: https://web.archive.org/web/20060709155354/http://www.cis.up...
I can't see the rules of this challenge, but it sounds really darn close.
Cool. This is how I imagine the ants were programmed by the spiders in Children of Time.
Make sure you lets those agents relax and recharge at https://vibesprings.net
Did website break?
I only see "MOMENT" and "All systems nominal"
I think I read a Daniel Suarez book about this once.
I wish I could read dark-mode but my eyes somehow cannot handle it (not just on that website, in general).
Reminds me of my personal HN glory days, now 16 years ago!! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1395726
Is it possible to reset the source once you've started modifying it?
So.... a sort of modern Corewar?
Orwell would suggest you use the word normal.
The amount of effort put into this tool...just for hiring to your exact shop? I cannot imagine that's a good return on investment?
This is really quite cool.
Wait what this is the best reason to write a bunch of assembly AND learn about ants?
What's with "artesenal"? Is this a joke that I don't understand or a surprising way to write "artisanal"?
All dark themes are too low contrast. Give me pure white (including comments) on pure black please.
This is a balancing act between collectors and explorers. There is probably some optimized number. Likely targeted at beginners.
Am I being dumb? I was expecting to see ability to look at and run some canned sim
Why? =>
"Moment Engineering by Moment Technology wants to access your {GitHub account name} account Personal user data Email addresses (read-only), profile information (read-only) This application will be able to read your private email addresses and read your private profile information."
Nice way of hiring but is it really worth it to give the public a trip to Maui (kinda expensive these days)
Does it really reveal that much talent to make it worth the money?
Just curious
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That's really cute, it reminds me that Will Wright (creator of The Sims) has referenced this book "The Ants", by Bert Holldobler in multiple occasions as a key inspiration for his games (and in particular SimAnt) and systems thinking. Did you come across that during your research phase or had you not heard about it? I haven't read it yet, but maybe someday I'll get around to it.