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Swarm: Program 200 Ants with a Custom Assembly Language in This Open Hiring Challenge

Canopy DevTools

Moment, a software tooling company, released Swarm — an open ant colony simulation challenge in which participants write programs in a custom assembly-like instruction set called "ant-ssembly" to control 200 ants and collect the maximum percentage of food across varied map layouts. Each ant operates identically with only local sensing (food, pheromones, home base, other ants) and no global view, requiring participants to design emergent coordination strategies through pheromone trails alone. The challenge closes March 12, 2026, features a live public leaderboard, and offers a trip to Maui as the grand prize.

Key Takeaways

  • Swarm challenge uses a custom ant-ssembly instruction set — each of 200 ants runs the same program and can sense nearby cells and emit/read pheromone trails; no global state available
  • Multiple map layouts (clustered food, scattered, obstacles) reward different emergent strategies; leaderboard is live at dev.moment.com as of March 6, 2026
  • Challenge closes March 12, 2026; grand prize is a Maui trip for two; open to all developers — 61 HN points and 14 comments as of March 6, 2026

Original source: Moment / Hacker News