Swarm
Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language
Details
- External ID
- 47270807
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Swarm
- Website domain
- moment.com
- Launched
- March 6, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 190
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9618696186961869
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
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.
Enrichment
- Theme
- AI agent frameworks and developer tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- ant colony programming game
- Manually corrected
- False
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 — 34 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #4 of 35 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 119 days after the earliest competitor.
- My 13-year-old built an ant colony tracker · hn · 2026-06-30 · 74 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Swarm · ph · 2026-09-18 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- SwarmAgent · ph · 2026-09-24 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Swarm · ph · 2026-09-18 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- SwarmWatch · hn · 2026-03-02 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- runstate - Agent Swarm Coordination · ph · 2026-09-18 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Agent Colony · ph · 2026-09-27 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Ant · hn · 2026-07-11 · 330 upvotes · similarity 0.37
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
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