AI Challenge - Ants

[Lishaak Bystroushaak]

Hi.

I don't think, that you have to use some advanced strategies and path
finding. I'm currently 261 with this simple code:
http://pastebin.com/1Nsb81rj With hill defense and ant grouping, you
could be imho easilly in first 100 without A* :)

2011/10/29 Sean Kelly <sean at invisibleduck.org>:
> If you want to cheat, there have been books published on ant colony optimization.  I'm sure the related papers could be dug up.
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Oct 29, 2011, at 3:12 AM, Max Wolter <awishformore at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 10/25/2011 1:44 PM, Trass3r wrote:
>>>> I'm working on a bot in D. I'm currently done implementing the A*
>>>> algorithm for path finding
>>>
>>> Dump A*, D* Lite ftw ;)
>>
>> Hellooo.
>>
>> Correct me if I'm wrong, but in A*, I can just find a path, store it (let's say as a string) and find a new one if it's blocked for some reason.
>>
>> As far as I could see from what I've read about Lifelong A*, D*, Focused D* and D* Lite, I would have to store all nodes used in the algorithm - so, as opposed to A*, I have to conserve the state of the entire search algorithm throughout ticks, for each ant.
>>
>> Is the environment in this AI challenge really noisy enough to warrant this? Obviously, if the path needs to be re-planned almost every tick, D* Lite seems like a better choice to me. But if you have 100+ ants, that would be a lot of allocated heap memory, wouldn't it?
>>
>> I really don't have a clue how the processing vs allocating should be weighed here performance-wise.
>>
>> /Max
>