Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language

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.

https://alliance.seas.upenn.edu/~plclub/contest/results.php

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you. I'm absolutely having a great time immersing myself in this, but I'm super sad about the day it will be taken down and i cant play anymore. Maybe that day is when the contest is over? Will there be some way i can keep enjoying this beautiful little world after the contest?

I know opening up the source or keeping the hosting up might be really hard to do for legal, security, cost or a million other complicated reasons. so if its not possible, thank you anyway :)

So simple and beautiful. So addicting. Love it! Thank you!

Thanks for organizing this! I had a great time playing with the system for a week even though I did not get anywhere close to the prize pool.

I have no idea if anyone checks these threads after a week but not that it's over, I am super curious what strategies other folks used. I used a python script to pre-process my programs to minimize jumps and downloaded the sim to run an iterative optimizer with parallelization. I just put a little writeup and the code on github https://github.com/Will-Morr/MomentSwarm.

This sounds a lot like a task of 2004 ICFPC Programming contest: ants, pheromone trails, only local vision, etc: https://web.archive.org/web/20060709155354/http://www.cis.up...

I can't see the rules of this challenge, but it sounds really darn close.

My "hello world" for a new stack is always a version of Worm. Somewhere between Life and your Swarm, Worm wanders around looking for food and water, trying to avoid birds and other issues. Each round the worm survives it grows by a segment. If it doesn't get food or water, it is reduced a segment. And so on. Your Swarm is a few levels up from my iterations, totally inspirational! Thanks!

what is this? assembly for ants?

I've been working on a surprisingly similar project for the last week: plants grow cells on a grid by executing a raw chunk of memory according to a simple instruction set. I'm aiming more for an evolution simulator, where each plant gets a 1kb brain that is randomized a little when a new plant is spawned.

Most plants right now settle into a simple goto loop that places the requisite cells to survive and then spam seeds until they die. I have seen some interesting variety in body plans emerge where plants sort into discrete species regionally. I'm hoping to eventually get decision making to emerge organically. If things go well this system is theoretically capable of sexual selection (and maybe fisherian runaway) but that's a pipe dream right now.

https://github.com/Will-Morr/PlantBrainGrid

I think I found a bug:

In the reference material under ARITHMETIC, it shows `AND r1 0xFF` as valid. However, actually using that code always produces zero regardless of what is in r1. My experiment concluded that only decimal inputs are supported, and hexadecimal are not, but the reference doesn't say that, and the editor doesn't flag the hexadecimal inputs as an error. Perhaps the reference material should be updated to simply show "255" instead of "0xFF".

Here is code to reproduce:

  ; ==================================================
  ; Bug Report:
  ;   AND operation returns 0 when give a hex argument
  ;
  ; Expected behavior:
  ;   (1 AND 0xF) should either equal 1 or the
  ;   line should be flagged as an error.
  ;
  ; Actual behavior:
  ;   (1 AND 0xF) equals 0 and does not flag error.
  ; ==================================================

  .alias input r0
  .alias output_using_hex r1
  .alias output_using_dec r2

  main:
      ; Pick any number only using bits 0xF
      SET input 1

      ; Test using hex
      SET output_using_hex input
      AND output_using_hex 0xF  ; no error raised

      ; Test using decimal
      SET output_using_dec input
      AND output_using_dec 15  ; (15 == 0xF)

      PICKUP  ; end the tick, so registers are stable
      ; Registers at this tick boundary:
      ; input:            1
      ; output_using_hex: 0 (incorrect)
      ; output_using_dec: 1 (correct)

      JMP main

Cool. This is how I imagine the ants were programmed by the spiders in Children of Time.

The disclosure route is cut off at the bottom: https://dev.moment.com/disclosures

I cannot scroll to the Governing Law section

I wish I could read dark-mode but my eyes somehow cannot handle it (not just on that website, in general).

Any chance of turning this into a server/client with an API so people could use the language of their choice?

Reminds me of my personal HN glory days, now 16 years ago!! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1395726

That was fun! Will there be a blog post / showcase or anything? I came in 9th, and will definitely be writing a blog post. I did not write a single line of antssembly during the contest!

Did website break?

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

I think I read a Daniel Suarez book about this once.

Make sure you lets those agents relax and recharge at https://vibesprings.net

This is a balancing act between collectors and explorers. There is probably some optimized number. Likely targeted at beginners.

Thank you! Will you release winners code?

So.... a sort of modern Corewar?

Is it possible to reset the source once you've started modifying it?

Orwell would suggest you use the word normal.

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?

Wait what this is the best reason to write a bunch of assembly AND learn about ants?

This is really quite cool.

What's with "artesenal"? Is this a joke that I don't understand or a surprising way to write "artisanal"?

All dark themes are too low contrast. Give me pure white (including comments) on pure black please.

Am I being dumb? I was expecting to see ability to look at and run some canned sim

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."

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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

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