[lrh9]

The Google Sponsored AI Challenge for winter 2011 is now open.

http://www.aichallenge.org/

The AI Challenge is all about creating artificial intelligence, whether you are a beginning programmer or an expert. Using one of the easy-to-use starter kits, you will create a computer program (in any language) that controls a colony of ants which fight against other colonies for domination.

It only takes 5 minutes to submit one of the starter kits to the website and watch your ant colony fight for domination against colonies created by other people from around the world. From there check out the tutorials on how to locally run your bot and begin programming!

[Bragi]

I always find it a pitty that it's mostly aimed at games. I which they would one day do something more chatbot oriented.

[Freddy]

Thanks Larry 

[DaveMorton]

I signed up, and downloaded the PHP version of the code, but with so many irons in the fire right now (I'm working on a complete re-design for the Christmas Village's tables, among other things), I don't know if I'll actually have time to do anything with it.

[lrh9]

One of the interesting aspects of the challenge is that it allows both a.i. and non-a.i. techniques.

I'm thinking about trying out a "dumb" bot that adopts the natural system of chemical signals.

Ants in real life leave chemical signals that help them.

I'm going to make each of my ants move onto the neighboring tile with the best (strongest) signal. The signal of each tile each turn will be determined by several things. Basically anything ants might be interested in will put out a signal in a certain radius of tiles, and ants will navigate towards the sources without complex path finding strategies. When they reach their destination and take care of the source, the signal will dissipate - preventing other ants from moving towards visited locations.

[DaveMorton]

I guess that the success/failure of such a system would be in the nature of the signals themselves. If it's a generic "look at me" flag, where you get the same type of signal from either a food source or an invading army of opposing ants, then you may be in for some trouble. If, however, each type of signal can be differentiated from one another, then I can see several scenarios that can lead to victory. After all, it seems to me that if you control all of the food, then you control the growth of your neighbors (at least to an extent). Of course, this is just off the top of my head (I haven't read word one of the documentation yet), so I may just be blowing smoke, but...