Over the weekend I updated my bot to use a line of sight to decide on what to do for each ant. This fixes some of the worst behaviors my ants had, but it’s not perfect. The ants no longer crowd up trying to get to food or a hill they can’t reach, but they’re still not terribly bright. I had to turn off the food reservation system because it wasn’t intelligent enough and the side effects were worse than the benefits.

So how smart is my bot now? I’m not sure. It should be better, but the AI Challenge keeps having server problems. My bot had to wait most of the weekend for games to start being played again, and they seemed to have another problem today. Because of this games aren’t happening very fast at all so my bot hasn’t had the chance to move up to it’s true rank. The AI Challenge forms have posts about alternate servers you can test you bot on, I may have to go to that.

I’m a little tired of working on the bot at this point, even though I can think of quite a few things I should do. After all the time I’ve put in lately, it would be nice to see my bot reach it’s potential (or at least where it was before the last change). The slow game rate was very demotivating.