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2004 ICFP Contest Spinoff Game
TheRealFoxFire writes "Taking a page from the popular Corewars competitive programming game,
the 2004
ICFP Programming Contest task has been turned into an online
competition: Ant Wars. In the game, programmers create
state-machine ant "brains" which battle against each other for food and
programmer glory. And just in time for the ICFP contest itself, where this year's winners will be announced."
Totally misread this the first time around:
...In the game, programmers with state-machine ant "brains" battle against each other for food and programmer glory...
...if you'd like to see a more advanced simulator which has an ant demo, see MASON. A nice paper on it was presented at AAMAS this year.
This sounds like IBM's Robocode contest from a while back. In that particular game, you wrote a robot class built around a predefined basic robot, using a provided API for stuff like "radar," and sensing when you're in the line of fire. Your robot would battle with N other robots in an arena, and the last left standing would win.
I think whoever won the contest last time won a new ThinkPad Notebook, but that was two years ago. By now, I think Robocode's been set aside within IBM.
Now it looks like some Third Party's built a competition around IBM's Robocode.
Michael C. Hollinger
[start] --> [attackjudges]
[attackjudges] --> [checkrankings]
[checkrankings] --> [idle] , if rank is "1st"
[checkrankings] --> [attackjudges] , otherwise
[idle] --> [checkrankings]
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
http://www.corewar.info/ Is maintained by Christrian Schmidt, one of the great corewars men. Or you could go to http://www.corewar.co.uk/ Maintained by John Metcalf, corewar hall of famer.
Or better yet, you could try www.koth.org or sal.math.ualberta.ca and go straight to the hills.
This is quite a nice visual program. The idea is to build a brain to "run" a bug. Nice educational tool....
The winners will be announced at the ICFP (International Conference on Functional Programming) itself, not the ICFP Programming Contest. The contest took place in June. The conference is in Snowbird, Utah, September 19-22. See you all there.
will the ants take the turing test do determine who gets to be the queen? i'm not witty.
I own a pump action golf ball cannon. I made it myself.
the ICFP conference, you mean? (Redundant, actually. The C stands for Conference.) The contest was months ago...
"In total there are 182 users online :: 2 Registered, 0 Hidden and 180 Guests"
Looks like a promising audience...
Have you seen my stapler?
Here is a very simple introduction for anyone new to the game and interested in playing.
http://www.koth.org/info/corewars_for_dummies/dum
Oh well.
I guess the Google algorithm took the words "ant" and "programmer" and assumed some kind of nasty infestation.
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
This sounds like a good application for swarm intelligence.
man, there were tanks and shit. BOOM!
some related stuff, as i was looking for it:
http://www.gammax.net/aiforge/game-links.htm
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
here's what i was looking for - a robot programming game you can use any language in
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
corewars.org is a quite unlucky link for corewar. Much better sources are:
/ /www.corewar.co.uk
http://koth.org
http://www.corewar.info
http:
Fizmo
Slashdot submitters: try to explain acronyms you use in your submission. Same should go to people who make the original websites too. It took a lot of poking around to figure out ICFP=International Conference on Functional Programming.
The corewars site linked to in the story has never been known to be active or complete.
The KOTH server is home to the "pro" hills of which 94NOP is the most active.
The most up-to-date site for info & links is Fizmo's.
There are beginner's hills and others at
SAL hills
Yellow hills
There's also an IRC channel at irc://irc.koth.org#corewars
Ant wars looks interesting - pity the event is over
It's done in Java, so why not use Java as the scripting language? I imagine with Java security managers, you could give programmers access to a small set of ant-related classes, and disallow access to everything else, including lots of the standard built-in classes, even HashTable and List, so you can't build particularly complex code. At least it would be in a standard syntax, instead of their custom state-machine language.
...)
...)
...) ...) ...)
...) ... ...))
Formicidae source files consist of a sequence of constant and state
definitions. They have the form:
(DEFINE-CONSTANT )
(DEFINE-STATE
STATE-EXPRESSION is any of:
(-> )
Unconditional jump to the state named by STATE-NAME>
(BEGIN
Sequencing of states.
(STATES ((
Local & recursive (a la LETREC) binding of state names to their
respective state sequences.
(IF
)
State branches. CONDITION may be a simple branch -- a Formicidae
state whose operator takes multiple continuations, {PICK-UP, MOVE,
SENSE, FLIP}, which would not be otherwise usable outside of IFs --
or uses one of the three boolean logic operators {NOT, OR, AND},
whose meanings are obvious.
(COND (
(ELSE
Syntactic sugar for nested conditionals. This is exactly as COND
in Scheme...
http://gotdotnet.com/terrarium/
The whole concept of using ants and insects to compete programmtically is a total rip-off of the Microsoft example at the above address.
OSS emulating pre-existing software; yep, nothing unusual about that.
I heard about a technology a few years ago nicknamed "Ants" for phone lines that found the best possible route from point to point in much the same way that ants leave chemical trails to tell the other ants where food etc. is.
I'm sure there's more practical uses of programming "ant brains" that this contest will uncover.
while (!asleep()) sheep++
And of course, you need to register before you can even have a look at this project. How friendly...
Watch great movie opening scenes!