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Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language (dev.moment.com)

190 points by armandhammer10 ↗ HN
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.

41 comments

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sudo_cowsay
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

TruffleLabs
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."

4b11b4
Wait what this is the best reason to write a bunch of assembly AND learn about ants?
nurettin
This is a balancing act between collectors and explorers. There is probably some optimized number. Likely targeted at beginners.
nozzlegear
I think I read a Daniel Suarez book about this once.
kleiba
I wish I could read dark-mode but my eyes somehow cannot handle it (not just on that website, in general).
TheAceOfHearts
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.
RandomTeaParty
Did website break?

I only see "MOMENT" and "All systems nominal"

FpUser
Am I being dumb? I was expecting to see ability to look at and run some canned sim
JetSetIlly
Cool. This is how I imagine the ants were programmed by the spiders in Children of Time.
ivanjermakov
All dark themes are too low contrast. Give me pure white (including comments) on pure black please.
orsorna
The amount of effort put into this tool...just for hiring to your exact shop? I cannot imagine that's a good return on investment?
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macleginn
What's with "artesenal"? Is this a joke that I don't understand or a surprising way to write "artisanal"?
anta40
So.... a sort of modern Corewar?