antheap

That didn't really tell much

Yeah. You should download the distribution and try it out yourself. There isn't much of a documentation to speak of, but after compiling try running the program with a sample ant "brain" file like:

./src/antheap2 ants/ant_wander_trail.so

.. and watch little ands (represented by blue and orange dots) flurry around the screen, picking and dropping little pile-thingies and in the end collecting all the loose bits into just a single pile.

So, what's the aim of this "game"?

The aim is to write an ant "brain" (which is just a single C routine with certain input parameters and valid output values) which will collect all pile-thingies (be they food, twigs or whateveryoulike) into a single pile.

That might not sound too hard thing to do, until you realize there are several handicaps that the individual ants have to live with:

• They have very limited amount of memory (typically at most 16 bits) per ant
• They have no knowledge of their global position or orientation in the world.
• They cannot directly sense other ants -- only their immediate location and pheromone levels in the direction they are facing.
• They can perform only the most rudimentary operations: turn left or right, move forward, pick, drop or release a pheromone to the environment.

Also, in "tournaments" (when different authors pit their ant "brains" against each other) they must perform reasonably well on several distinct environments which vary by their size, the initial density of the pile-things and also by the number of the ants. Since the "brain" has no a priori knowledge of these parameters, it must be versatile to fare well very different circumstances.

The mandatory screenshot

So, here it goes. In this picture you can see several (30 in fact) ants running around, some carrying pile-thingies (colored orange) and some not (colored blue). Also the piles are marked with varying shades of gray. The two pheromone types this variety of ant uses are marked with red and green squares. The intensity of the color in the square is relative to the intensity of the pheromone level in that location.

Oh, there's also a separate page which contains an animated image of the program in action.