[Icfp04-discuss] Ant Wars spinoff

[Scott G. Miller]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2004 at 05:16:54PM +0300, Rares Ispas wrote:
> I would like to remind the community that the online tournament at
> 
> http://www.raisoftware.ro/TreeContent/Articles/ICFP/LastTournament.aspx
> 
> is still alive, though not very healthy. We have five teams competing,  
> Eijiro and PacSoft sharing the number one spot.
> 
> Joining is easy, and yes, no Google ads, nor spam email:
> http://www.raisoftware.ro/TreeContent/Articles/ICFP/AddAnt.aspx
> 
> ICFP 2004 has been a great contest, but I think that the domain was pretty  
> much explored for any significant new developments to occur, unless some  
> of the ants limitations are removed. Thing is, those limitations made if  
> funny. More marking bits would allow classical shortest paths algorithms  
> to be used.

Ant Wars does exactly that; remove some limitations and assumptions. 
Firstly, the ICFP contest had random maps.  This meant that ants
couldn't be optimized for certain tasks.  Ant Wars, on the other hand,
has fixed and random maps, so it doesn't always make sense to have a
'Renaissance' ant. 

ICFP also had pretty simplistic marks.  Ant Wars modifies them to fade 
over time, and gives the ants the ability to lay an amount of pheromone.  
This allows for more dynamic use of the pheromones for optimizing 
behavior such as the shortest path algorithm without needing more mark 
bits.  

There are also a lot of areas to explore in map design.  "Charge!" in 
Ant Wars has no food, and has some map structures which can be taken 
advantage of stragically in combat.  Other maps may have more 
challenging terrain, such as placing food in hard to reach areas 
requiring smarter harvesting ants to find it.  

Finally, Ant Wars isn't limited to two player play, so there are a whole 
host of areas to explore in terms of denser maps, cooperation, etc.

ICFP was fantastic, but we're extending the game into the long term.

	Scott
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