mj41

The AI Challenge Fall 2011 (sponsored by Google) is all about creating a computer program (in any language) that controls a colony of ants which fight against other colonies for domination.
Look at number of users per language:

• Perl: 81
• Ruby: 174
• PHP: 339
• Python: 1759

Number of all users is 2924. Game engine is written in Python and you can run your games (and see game animation in your browser) on your local machine.
The best ranks and skills for some languages are

• Java: 1 (rank) / 90.49 (skill)
• Go: 2 / 90.45
• C++: 4 / 87.40
• Python: 15 / 84.14
• C#: 21 / 82.97
• C: 25 / 82.12
• Haskell: 38 / 81.06
• Lisp: 42 / 80.77
• Pascal: 73 / 78.87
• ...
• Ruby: 184 / 74.32
• PHP: 192 / 74.11
• Perl: 397 / 69.69

You can join #perl-ai channel on irc.freenode.org and start hacking with your bot based on my AIAnts Perl framework (on GitHub). My bot's current skill is 52.94 and rank 1742. If you can fix issue 1 (turn timed out) and use real dir_from_to path finding algorithm (already prepared - based on AI::Pathfinding::AStar) then you can beat my bot (which use stupid dir_from_to_easy).

AIAnts Perl framework documentation and code:

• docs/devel.pod - base howto
• bots/RandomBot.pm - random bot example
• bots/HungryBot.pm - hungry bot example
• MyBot.pm - mj41cz's bot, skill 52.94

Be aware that much of AIAnts framework code is in experimental state. Not tested, not documented.

Less than two weeks remain to register and upload your bot code. On December 18 at 11:59pm EST submissions will be closed.

Enjoy fun.