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.

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).

That is, even separate agents running on one brain will never have simultaneous access to the same information (unless you cheat by pausing time).

Even then it's important to note that various agents operating on varying principles of how to transform / relate to information might only be "capable" of noting specific subsets of "the same information", and that this is -- I believe -- contextually relevant to comparing brains to ant colonies. Just like how the parts of your brain that handle emotions will not be involved in processing ... (read more)

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AI Challenge: Ants

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AI Challenge: Ants

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