[Icfp04-discuss] Al-Gore-Rhythm team's website & ants

[Darin Kelkhoff]

Perennial ICFP Programming Contest Team: The Al-Gore-Rhythms present their
2004 contest entry web site:

Our 2004 Contest Submission: Mephisto's 5-assed ants.
http://www.kingsrook.com/icfp/

web site contains:
- README file, gives overview of strategy & implementation
- solution-1.ant and solution-2.ant
- submission.tar.gz
- JavaDocs from project
- source tree
- photos
- more to come!

a quick overview (and explanation of our name):   we quickly decided that:
 a) we didn't _want_ to really write a smart program in FSM/assembly like
language (too much "gimp work", we've no experience in low-level language
like this, and a non program generated solution seems like a sell out, as
several teams sold out last year by driving cars by hand)
 b) we probably weren't smart enough to write ants in that language that
were good enough to beat people who could write good code in ant language.

with these 2 points in mind, we decided to build our ants using evolution
seeded by intelligent design -- a genetic (or evolutionary) algorithm that
would select ants based on the fitness.  these ants were built out of 2-15
line "functions" that we did end up writing in ant-language (though through
java, not by hand).  so now, even if our currently submitted ants aren't
good enough to win, we can always just let our genetic algo. run a few more
days, and eventually a better species will emerge.

oh -- our name -- for south park fans, you'll remember the genetic engineer
Mephisto, who proudly built four assed monkeys, mongooses, etc.  we'll,
we've improved on his technology a bit, and now have 5 asses on our ant's.