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15yrs back I participated in "Google Ants AI Challenge 2011", an ai programming competition, hosted by the University of Waterloo, and I ranked #127 (#1 in my c

15yrs back I participated in "Google Ants AI Challenge 2011", an ai programming competition, hosted by the University of Waterloo, and I ranked #127 (#1 in my country). The competition gave me a huge learning oppurtunity where developers across the world came to a forum and discussed various techniques. Now, I've built a similar platform to bring back the fun of building a small neural network that can play the game well. Neural Network optimization seems to be much more fun. Plz share your feedback to improve the platform and add more games.

atmanactive 12d ago
I remember a game on Steam called Tiny Brains, great couch co-op.
AnotherGoodName 12d ago
Nice. I was 72nd. Working in AI research today and still making ai for games as a hobby (tfmbot.com is an ai i’m working on for my favourite board game terraforming mars).
- codetiger 12d ago
  Thanks for sharing. I remember #1 xathis had a score, big leap ahead of others. The difference in techniques in top 100 was almost the same.
Muthaalagan 11d ago
From competing with the world to building a place for the world to compete—what a full-circle moment. Love the challenge: how much strategy can a tiny neural network learn? Excited to see what people build.
nickledave 11d ago
Nice work, the new site looks great. Can you give more background on the Ants game? I didn't find it on the current site or the older one. Was the game inspired by anything like agent-based simulations? I'm not super interested in what the tech industry is calling "agentic" AI, but I am interested in collective intelligence, see David Ha's work in this area: - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/26339137221114874 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/26339137221114... - https://neurips.cc/virtual/2024/105817 https://neurips.cc/virtual/2024/105817 Would be cool if each ant itself could be an agent
- codetiger 11d ago
  Unfortunately the competition site is mostly down and couldn't find much about the old competition other than the participants blog articles. Do a search on "Google Ants AI Challenge - post mortem", and you get a lot of articles around the game. Thanks for sharing the research. I tried implementing a per Ant decision making model, but gave up as the training time was much longer compared to the current baseline. I think I should rethink the idea.

atmanactive 12d ago

I remember a game on Steam called Tiny Brains, great couch co-op.

AnotherGoodName 12d ago

Nice. I was 72nd. Working in AI research today and still making ai for games as a hobby (tfmbot.com is an ai i’m working on for my favourite board game terraforming mars).

codetiger 12d ago
Thanks for sharing. I remember #1 xathis had a score, big leap ahead of others. The difference in techniques in top 100 was almost the same.

Muthaalagan 11d ago

From competing with the world to building a place for the world to compete—what a full-circle moment. Love the challenge: how much strategy can a tiny neural network learn? Excited to see what people build.

nickledave 11d ago

Nice work, the new site looks great. Can you give more background on the Ants game? I didn't find it on the current site or the older one. Was the game inspired by anything like agent-based simulations? I'm not super interested in what the tech industry is calling "agentic" AI, but I am interested in collective intelligence, see David Ha's work in this area: - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/26339137221114874 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/26339137221114... - https://neurips.cc/virtual/2024/105817 https://neurips.cc/virtual/2024/105817 Would be cool if each ant itself could be an agent

codetiger 11d ago
Unfortunately the competition site is mostly down and couldn't find much about the old competition other than the participants blog articles. Do a search on "Google Ants AI Challenge - post mortem", and you get a lot of articles around the game. Thanks for sharing the research. I tried implementing a per Ant decision making model, but gave up as the training time was much longer compared to the current baseline. I think I should rethink the idea.