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."

Comments

Sounds like IBM's Robocode contest from...

[Hollinger]

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.

Re:Sounds like IBM's Robocode contest from...

[Fjornir]

Let's not forget C Robots! A similiar game where you hack your robot's instructions with a psuedo-c.

There's a C++ variant as well.

There was a less interesting (but much more complex) programmable-robot game floating around in the BBS days which used a BASIC. Although it had a beautiful GUI (for the era) its biggest failing was that it allowed customization of your robot's chasis, weaponry, etc. Unfortunately this wasn't well balanced, and the competition we had running quickly degraded and we all lost interest.

Re:Sounds like IBM's Robocode contest from...

[r2q2]

This is more advanced than core wars. Instead of having one program it has the same program done multiple times (as little ants). Look at the species page and try a combination (Foo 0.1 against foo 0.4 for example). Note you need java.

Bug Brain

[tuxter]

This is quite a nice visual program. The idea is to build a brain to "run" a bug. Nice educational tool....

realtimebattle

[Hubert_Shrump]

here's what i was looking for - a robot programming game you can use any language in

Strange syntax

[ceswiedler]

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...

Phones

[xombo]

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.