Google AI Challenge 2011 (Ants)

I followed the last Google AI challenge pretty closely, and enjoyed it, but how does the organizer Jeff Cameron keep getting away with invoking Google in the competition's name? He has basically zero affiliation to Google, and the last round of the competition had some pretty embarrassing snafus. (For instance, registration was broken for quite a while because he was using the Google SMTP server to send out messages, and when the competition opened and his registration script starting sending out huge numbers of registration emails, Google shut him down as a probable spammer.)

In the past, the google challenge results were unfair:<p>Your bot was ranking based on a single game against a minority of other bots and on a random map.<p>At least they should have let the top 100 ranked bots played against other multiple times.

Here's a better page which gives a good overview: <a href="https://github.com/aichallenge/aichallenge/wiki/Ants-Game-Specification" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/aichallenge/aichallenge/wiki/Ants-Game-Sp...</a>

I did a git clone last night and carefully read through the starter kits for Common Lisp, Java, and Python. A long time ago, in my book "C++ Power Paradigms" the last example was using a genetic algorithm to train a recurrent neural net for the Sante Fe Ant Trail problem. My original idea was starting with weights represented with relatively few bits, and adding less significant bits slowly during training. My hope was that I would quickly find reasonable areas of weight values so the search for good values with a reasonable number of bits per weight would not take too long. After I wrote that John Koza told me that I had an interesting idea but probably not useful. That said, I am tempted to brush off my old idea and try it again.

Choosing Ants as the next challenge is a bit of a bet. I'm a bit afraid that the game is too random to get really interesting AIs. Fog of war + food spawning at random places can bring early advantage to those players that explored the map 'just right'.<p>Disclaimer: I really enjoyed playing the Tron and PlanetWars challenges. Although I was a bit disappointed with my final ranking in PlanetWars (~80), I think that game was close to perfect.

I'm planning on building a ruby bot. I'll be putting at least my "non-proprietary" logic code up on github.<p>Anyone interested in working together?

The battle rules look a little problematic. Seems like you'll be coding up formations and counter formations rather than overall strategy.<p><a href="https://github.com/aichallenge/aichallenge/wiki/Ants-Game-Specification" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/aichallenge/aichallenge/wiki/Ants-Game-Sp...</a>

Is anyone else going to build a bot? I'm going to make one in Python or Javascript. Looking for co-commander.

What is the deadline?