[dead]
Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language
51–60 of 88 posts
Re: Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language
#52The amount of effort put into this tool...just for hiring to your exact shop? I cannot imagine that's a good return on investment?
People like doing cool stuff
Re: Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language
#53The amount of effort put into this tool...just for hiring to your exact shop? I cannot imagine that's a good return on investment?
i think this took me (1 person) like 40 hours max? all built in the last week, though i spent more time than i should have on it haha. quite ai-assisted, that's how most of the layout like the editor, player controls, even eval server got set up.
i spent way too much time on things like the language itself, map generation, and figuring how to only recompute the sim on material code changes vs whitespace and comments (it assembles to "bytecode" with debouncing! and the sim component takes the bytecode as a prop).
we'll see if good ROI, we definitely intend to run more of these types of challenges in the future, so much of this work won't go to waste
Re: Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language
#54Re: Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language
#55Nice 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
The prizes (Maui trip, second/third prizes, swag kits, shipping for the swag kits) probably cost around $20k in total. Assuming an engineer costs $200k/year, 200 effective working days per year, that's 1k/day. Developing the contest (from the idea to building the rules to building the site to playtesting) likely cost more than 20 eng-days, making it the biggest cost. Hiring is expensive. If it takes 30 minutes to scr…
Sure, hiring is expensive, but firing is really expensive! I salute your efforts to get it right on the first try.
Re: Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language
#56All dark themes are too low contrast. Give me pure white (including comments) on pure black please.
on the home page (dev.moment.com) you can type `theme -h` and then `theme set [name]` to change the color scheme, which carries forward to the sim!
Yes. I checked every theme and all dark themes are too low contrast. Pacman is good but comments are barely readable (gray on dark gray).
Re: Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language
#57The amount of effort put into this tool...just for hiring to your exact shop? I cannot imagine that's a good return on investment?
There's also a trip to Hawaii in it for you.
Re: Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language
#58That'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.
Re: Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language
#59[deleted]
Re: Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language
#60That'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.
Hey, I'm the one who built this particular challenge! I had no clue, but thanks for the book lead! It didn't come up directly, but SimCity 2000 and especially SimCity 4 had a huge impact on me growing up / I still spin up SimCity 4 from time to time, so I imagine there's a massive indirect influence haha.
This is exceptionally beautiful. What did you use to build it? Vanilla JS?