AI Challenge

Attribution asobi tsuchiya

The University of Waterloo Computer Science Club has been running an AI competition for a short while which involves training ants to battle rival ant gangs for ant supremacy!

All a bit of fun, no prizes up for grabs but its been a while since I've touched anything AI-esque so will try a few ideas out and see how well my ants perform.

The platform supports most common used languages, prolog being a notable omission from an AI competition.

I downloaded the python version of the tools and examples for the following reasons;

1. The demos given are in python or java
2. I have PyDev installed
3. I am lazy

The site advises "get your name on the global leaderboard in less than five minutes", owing to point 3 above I decided to take that challenge and it is true that you can have submitted code waiting to battle against other ant controlling bots in that sort of time… However your ants will probably just end up crashing into each other and if they do happen to stumble upon some food (a mechanism for gaining more ant troops) your new ant will sit on top of your anthill preventing any other ants from joining your front lines.

Fortunately there are tutorials to help you build upon the starter code and to build some basic behaviors, its a start but certainly nowhere near the end of what is possible!

Next up for my ants… learning that they can't swim!

edit :: And also how to guard their base it seems :(