AI Challenge: Ants

lavalamp

Aichallenge.org has started their third AI contest this year: Ants.

The AI Challenge is all about creating artificial intelligence, whether you are a beginning programmer or an expert. ... [Y]ou will create a computer program (in any language) that controls a colony of ants which fight against other colonies for domination. ... The current phase of the contest will end December 18th at 11:59pm EST. At that time submissions will be closed. Shortly thereafter the final tournament will be started. ... Upon completion the contest winner will be announced and all results will be publically available.

Ants is a multi-player strategy game set on a plot of dirt with water for obstacles and food that randomly drops. Each player has one or more hills where ants will spawn. The objective is for players to seek and destroy the most enemy ant hills while defending their own hills. Players must also gather food to spawn more ants, however, if all of a player's hills are destroyed they can't spawn any more ants.

I mentioned this in the open thread, and there was a discussion about possibly making one or more "official" LessWrong teams. D_Alex has offered a motivational prize. If this interests you, please discuss in the comments!

Aichallenge.org has started their third AI contest this year: Ants.

The AI Challenge is all about creating artificial intelligence, whether you are a beginning programmer or an expert. ... [Y]ou will create a computer program (in any language) that controls a colony of ants which fight against other colonies for domination. ... The current phase of the contest will end December 18th at 11:59pm EST. At that time submissions will be closed. Shortly thereafter the final tournament will be started. ... Upon completion the contest winner will be announced and all results will be publically available.

Ants is a multi-player strategy game set on a plot of dirt with water for obstacles and food that randomly drops. Each player has one or more hills where ants will spawn. The objective is for players to seek and destroy the most enemy ant hills while defending their own hills. Players must also gather food to spawn more ants, however, if all of a player's hills are destroyed they can't spawn any more ants.

Considering that I'm new at the game, I'm a bit fuzzy about which strategies work and which ones are dead ends.

My first instinct would be to try simple strategies (cluster with my ants, follow walls, avoid my ants, just charge straight forwards, etc.) and then use a mixed strategy whose parameter I can vary, possibly function of simple environment metrics (so I can systematically explore one bit of the space of possibilities).

But I haven't read through all the site yet, and didn't even get my local version to run correctly either (I need to use the right version of Python or something, the bots all crash). So my understanding of the kind of strategies involved is still very detached from reality.

Watch some of the games of the top bots. One thing I haven't seen a top bot do yet is identify situations where they have an impasse (e.g., three ants holding off an entire horde) and try another route.

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AI Challenge: Ants

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AI Challenge: Ants

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