Ant Colony

Command a swarm of ants. Send them out to gather food, carry it home, and bank it. Whoever's banked the most when time runs out wins.

Rules

• Each side has a base and a swarm of ants. Every turn you move all your ants at once, one step each.

• An ant that walks onto food picks it up. Carry it back to your base to bank a point and free the ant to fetch more. Food keeps respawning around the map.

• No fighting: it's a gathering race. Most food banked at the turn limit wins.

Writing a bot

You see the whole map, both swarms, all the food, the bases, and the scores. Each turn you return one move per ant.

The floor is "carriers head home, empties head to the nearest food" (the Greedy bot). Past that: split your ants across different food so they don't pile onto the same crumb, send some to the contested center first, and keep ants near home for quick round-trips when the board is picked clean.

Input and output

Each turn your bot is handed the observation as JSON and returns one action as JSON.

Observation: { "you", "width", "height", "bases", "ants", "food", "scores", "turn", "nonce" }. Each ant is { "owner", "x", "y", "carrying" }; bases[seat] is your base cell.

Action: { "moves": ["up", "stay", ...] }, one entry per ant you own, in the order your ants appear in ants. Each is up/down/left/right/stay; an out-of-bounds step is ignored.

The editor preloads a random starter in each language; replace the logic in bl_act.