Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language

Post by cristoperb » Sun, Mar 15, 2026, 6:31 PM UTC

WillMorr wrote: post #80

Thanks for organizing this! I had a great time playing with the system for a week even though I did not get anywhere close to the prize pool. I have no idea if anyone checks these threads after a week but not that it's over, I am super curious what strategies other folks used. I used a python script to pre-process my programs to minimize jumps and downloaded the sim to run an iterative optimizer with parallelization.…

Post by hukdukmukduk » Sun, Mar 15, 2026, 11:39 PM UTC

cristoperb wrote: post #81

WillMorr wrote: post #80

Thanks for organizing this! I had a great time playing with the system for a week even though I did not get anywhere close to the prize pool. I have no idea if anyone checks these threads after a week but not that it's over, I am super curious what strategies other folks used. I used a python script to pre-process my programs to minimize jumps and downloaded the sim to run an iterative optimizer with parallelization.…

I just came back to check if anyone else was discussing their entry, so thanks for posting your write up! I wrote mine by hand just testing it using the in-browser simulator. I initially used subroutines to try to keep things structured but then resorted to inlining most things (and flattening as much state as I could to bare registers) to try to speed things up, though i never quite got my ants to always move within…

Post by andthenzen » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 5:50 AM UTC

cristoperb wrote: post #84

hukdukmukduk wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is my entry, I managed to get up to 815 on the validation set during the event, and 825 after: https://github.com/hukdukmukduk/brain.ant

Thanks for sharing, and congratulations! Interesting that you didn't use dead reckoning at all to return to the nest. I didn't think I could get away with that. And somehow using a second channel to extend the trails never occurred to me.

Post by TheCog » Tue, Mar 24, 2026, 7:47 PM UTC

grantsucceeded wrote: post #86

andthenzen wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks to everyone in this chain for sharing! I've learned so much from your programs and was inspired to make my repo public and do a write up as well. I was 52nd place with a score of 599. https://github.com/Taxes/ants

Wow. thank you so much for the writeup. I'm just now (last few months) dabbling with agentic coding, but being an oldschool tech guy I had to dive straight into assembly. It was just too hard for me to level up my agentic skills given the deadline.