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.

It's the program written in the context of the game that acts as a single agent by processing the same information with pseudo-'simultaneity'.

I believe I understand what you are saying here. I just don't think it fairly describes what lavalamp was saying.

My reading of that passage is that his assertion was that humans, by having separate agents all running "in one brain", cease being separate agents as a result of "having simultaneous access to the same information".

EDIT: Okay, now I find myself confused. By the course of the dialogue it's clear that pedanterrific did not downvote my comment, so someone not replying to it must have. I am left without insight as to why this was done, however.

I'm not the one downvoting you, either.

I'm not so sure our anticipations necessarily differ. I think separate agents with amazingly fast communication will approach the performance of a unified mind, and a mind with poor internal communication will approach the performance of separate agents. Human minds arguably might have poor internal communication, but I'm still betting that it's more than one order of magnitude better than what ants do. I think our disagreement is more about the scale of this difference than anything.

The fundamental barrier to communi... (read more)

2pedanterrific15y

Well, if you're correct and that is what lavalamp is asserting, I pretty much agree with you. Humans are definitely not "unified minds", and the difference between separate agents running on one or multiple brains may be large, but it's quantitative, not qualitative. That is, even separate agents running on one brain will never have simultaneous access to the same information (unless you cheat by pausing time).

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AI Challenge: Ants

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AI Challenge: Ants

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