Contest: Army Ants

November 5th, 2008

I love the MATLAB contest, I am not sure if it is more fun to play the contest or to help design and administer it. Either way, I am looking forward to seeing a lot of really great algorithms from people.

This contest is a revisiting of the popular ants contest. However, your red ants are living in a bigger world now. They have a neighbor that has the same goal as them: bring the sugar home. This leads to a different kind of environment where the sugar you are trying to gather is also desired by the ‘house team’: the black ants. Do you let the black ants move ‘your’ sugar unchecked, or do you use your new attack power to kill them? The black ants are singing “We come in peace, shoot to kill, shoot to kill!”, which do you believe?

One major change in this contest is that each day the red ant team that is winning will become ‘King of the anthill’. That is right, they become the black ants, and thus become the house team. Who will get that honor, and who can keep it the longest?

Knowing what the new contest is, you can see that this puzzler: was actually my way of getting people to help develop my entry for the MathWorks internal version of the contest.

So, let’s get started with the 18th MATLAB programing contest: Army Ants!
MATLAB contest

By Doug Hull

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2 Responses to “Contest: Army Ants”

matt fig replied on November 7th, 2008 at 19:12 UTC :

“Knowing what the new contest is, you can see that this puzzler: was actually my way of getting people to help develop my entry for the MathWorks internal version of the contest.”

That is so funny. As I read the description of the new contest I was immediately reminded of that older puzzler. This made me wonder if your puzzler was a stage in the development of the contest. Now it all makes sense!

dhull replied on November 11th, 2008 at 15:36 UTC :

Yes, I can be tricky like that. I have an idea to develop a large program piece by piece through these puzzlers, I just need a good idea of one.

The trees puzzle was going to be like that, but it did not work out that way. I will keep trying.

Doug

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November 5th, 2008