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.

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phreeza 6 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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

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RandomTeaParty 31 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Did website break?

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

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TheAceOfHearts an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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nozzlegear 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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i_am_a_squirrel 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

what is this? assembly for ants?

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armandhammer10 6 hours ago | parent [-]

ant-ssembly to be precise

	▲	testfrequency 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		So hot right now

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kleiba 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

	▲	purplehat_ 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		there is a `theme set` command

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4b11b4 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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armandhammer10 6 hours ago | parent [-]

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 ;)

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embedding-shape an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> But in all seriousness, ants are smarter than they look.

I'd argue the opposite, ants are dumber than they look. You look at a random ant stack in the forest and it looks like they're smart, but that's only when they're "controlled" by the collective, individual ants themselves are pretty dumb in the end, but it's hard to see as typically we always see them around/in their stacks in nature.

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lukan 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As a collective, yes. If you look at individuals, they often go in circles and act really dumb. But for the colony it still works out, bigger brains would cost too much energy I suppose and simple algorithms work. (I often watched real ants while and my head translated their behavior to simple algorithms)

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kitd 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Someone else who has read Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter?

	▲	oddmade 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Excellent book cheers

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FpUser 30 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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nurettin 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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TruffleLabs 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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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sudo_cowsay 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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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armandhammer10 7 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	dr_kiszonka 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	nylonstrung an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Appreciate this, very cool of you to do that