Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language
dev.moment.com129 points by armandhammer10 11 hours ago
129 points by armandhammer10 11 hours ago
We built an ant colony simulation as an internal hiring challenge at Moment and decided to open it up publicly.
You write a program in a custom assembly-like (we call it ant-ssembly) instruction set that controls 200 ants. Each ant can sense nearby cells (food, pheromones, home, other ants) but has no global view. The only coordination mechanism is pheromone trails, which ants can emit and sense them, but that's it. Your program runs identically on every ant.
The goal is to collect the highest percentage of food across a set of maps. Different map layouts (clustered food, scattered, obstacles) reward very different strategies. The leaderboard is live.
Grand prize is a trip to Maui for two paid for by Moment. Challenge closes March 12.
Curious what strategies people discover. We've seen some surprisingly clever emergent behavior internally.
That's really cute, it reminds me that Will Wright (creator of The Sims) has referenced this book "The Ants", by Bert Holldobler in multiple occasions as a key inspiration for his games (and in particular SimAnt) and systems thinking. Did you come across that during your research phase or had you not heard about it? I haven't read it yet, but maybe someday I'll get around to it. what is this? assembly for ants? It's assembly for people who can code good.. and can do other things good too. Did website break? I only see "MOMENT" and "All systems nominal" Incredible low contrast font color in use there. Looks like about 0x002000 on pure black (per Mk-1 eyeball). What possesses people to go for these barely perceptible color schemes? .. a few minutes later .. Ok, the crazy low contrast was on the initial landing page. Things have somewhat improved after prodding somewhat blindly at it. I'll let the question stand though, bc why do that for what's going to be people's first impression? Cool. This is how I imagine the ants were programmed by the spiders in Children of Time. Reminds me of my personal HN glory days, now 16 years ago!! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1395726 All dark themes are too low contrast. Give me pure white (including comments) on pure black please. I wish I could read dark-mode but my eyes somehow cannot handle it (not just on that website, in general). Wait what this is the best reason to write a bunch of assembly AND learn about ants? And (potentially) go to Hawaii! But in all seriousness, ants are smarter than they look. They operate as a collective. Just in the same way that assembly needs to operate collectively to get the best output. They're more closely linked than they appear from the outside ;) > ants are smarter than they look. Many moons ago I had a big pot of rhubarb in my back yard¹ and was initially irritated by the appearance of ants and aphids, until I took a moment to watch them and realise that the ants were bringing in the aphids and tending to them. The buggers were farming. The ants can't digest the leaves of the rhubarb, but the aphids can and excrete a sugary by-product that the ants “milk” from them. It is a fascinating bit of nature to read into. They even defend the aphids from predators and so forth, so it isn't a bad life for them either. -------- [1] Not a euphemism for a lovely garden in that case, it was literally about a square yard of concrete behind the mid-terrace I was renting. > But in all seriousness, ants are smarter than they look. I'd argue the opposite, ants are dumber than they look. You look at a random ant stack in the forest and it looks like they're smart, but that's only when they're "controlled" by the collective, individual ants themselves are pretty dumb in the end, but it's hard to see as typically we always see them around/in their stacks in nature. As a collective, yes. If you look at individuals, they often go in circles and act really dumb. But for the colony it still works out, bigger brains would cost too much energy I suppose and simple algorithms work. (I often watched real ants while and my head translated their behavior to simple algorithms) This is a balancing act between collectors and explorers. There is probably some optimized number. Likely targeted at beginners. Am I being dumb? I was expecting to see ability to look at and run some canned sim Why? => "Moment Engineering by Moment Technology
wants to access your {GitHub account name} account
Personal user data
Email addresses (read-only), profile information (read-only)
This application will be able to read your private email addresses and read your private profile information." Nice way of hiring but is it really worth it to give the public a trip to Maui (kinda expensive these days) Does it really reveal that much talent to make it worth the money? Just curious The prizes (Maui trip, second/third prizes, swag kits, shipping for the swag kits) probably cost around $20k in total. Assuming an engineer costs $200k/year, 200 effective working days per year, that's 1k/day. Developing the contest (from the idea to building the rules to building the site to playtesting) likely cost more than 20 eng-days, making it the biggest cost. Hiring is expensive. If it takes 30 minutes to screen one candidate for suitability for the "real" interview and 5h to do a "real" interview (including evaluation etc.), 5 screenings for one interview-worthy candidate and 5 interviews for one hire (I suspect the real factors might be closer to 10), that's 12.5h of screening and 25h of interviewing per hire. It's less about the money. It's about giving people a chance to do something fun / show off their skills and get rewarded for it. Plus, Hawaii is awesome. I think it is a fun contest! As for recruitment, it suggests to me you are looking for people with no kids, and possibly young people. [flagged] > my goy master I’m sorry your what now? sorry, im jewish, lets not be racist here Nobody who talks like this has ever been Jewish, in my experience: you'd be the first.
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