[Icfp04-discuss] Unofficial Tournament

[Jed Davis]

"Benjamin C. Pierce" <bcpierce at saul.cis.upenn.edu> writes:

> I've just discussed it with some of the other contest organizers
> (everybody that could be found in their offices on a Friday afternoon
> :-), and we see no problem with running a tournament of "second
> generation" ants.  We only request that people submit ants that are
> "nontrivially different" from the ones entered in the official contest.

Nontrivial difference is an... interesting concept where emergent
(sort of) behaviors are involved; for instance, one of my post-contest
ants differs from one of my submissions in the addition of a chance
per step for an ant seeking food to erase the hex of food trail it's
following.  The result being that the ants no longer swarm around dead
food spots --- meaning that they're more efficient at collecting food,
but also don't rake in kills the ways their predecessors could.

(Not that kill-count in and of itself helps all that much, IME.  And
certainly not at the expense of collection efficiency like that.
(This is, of course, as the organizers have said they intended.))

And then there's another ant subsystem I was developing a week or so
ago, where I messed up an invariant and thus indirectly caused the
formation of a shell of spinning ants two hexes outside of the hive; I
fixed this with, I think, the addition a single Sense insn.

> In fact, we're quite interested to see what kinds of strategies people
> can come up with, given a longer time to think about ant programming.
> We may even submit some of our own ants... :-)

In the spirit of inspiring the ant arms race, I present:

  http://www.panix.com/~jdev/ant/consternation.jpeg

The black ants are the infamous dunkosmiloolop-1.ant; the red ones are
one of my post-contest experiments --- which, I add, are decidedly a
proof of concept rather than a practical counter-strategy (i.e., they
lose anyway.)


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