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!