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Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language
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.
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
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.
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 ;)
what is this? assembly for ants?
ant-ssembly to be precise
This is a balancing act between collectors and explorers. There is probably some optimized number. Likely targeted at beginners.