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Swarm

Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language

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We built an ant colony simulation as an internal hiring challenge at Moment and decided to open it up publicly.You write a program in a custom assembly-like (we call it ant-ssembly) instruction set that controls 200 ants. Each ant can sense nearby cells (food, pheromones, home, other ants) but has no global view. The only coordination mechanism is pheromone trails, which ants can emit and sense them, but that's it. Your program runs identically on every ant.The goal is to collect the highest percentage of food across a set of maps. Different map layouts (clustered food, scattered, obstacles) reward very different strategies. The leaderboard is live.Grand prize is a trip to Maui for two paid for by Moment. Challenge closes March 12.Curious what strategies people discover. We've seen some surprisingly clever emergent behavior internally.

HN · launched Mar 6, 2026 · 190 upvotes (top 4%) · 0 views

Niche: simulation games · 118 launches, 10 in the last 7 days ▼ -44% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags
  • Education
  • Dev tools
  • B2C
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

More like this: all 118 launches in simulation games →

Could you build this?

Yes An in-browser virtual machine interpreter for a simple custom assembly language updating a 2D grid array on a canvas loop is a contained programming task easily generated by AI.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: 2004 ICFPC Programming contest (similar ants/pheromone challenge)

Concerns raised: Simulator will be taken down after contest ends, no permanent access, Hexadecimal literal support broken in arithmetic operations, 64 operation step limit difficult to stay within

Feature requests: Server/client API to support multiple programming languages, Release winners' code and solutions, Blog post/showcase of winning strategies

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 72 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #8 of 73 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 119 days after the earliest competitor.

Related data

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