Google and UT’s 2011 AI Challenge: Ants

gareth.es

30 points·ggfa··9 comments

I'm pretty sure that the contest is hosted by the University of Waterloo's Computer Science Club; Google is a sponsor, UofT is definitely not a host -- http://aichallenge.org/faq.php

We are no longer directly connected with University of Waterloo's CSC and have never been affiliated with UofT. There are a few current and past UofW students that are still admins in the contest but also a few others that have stepped up from around the world to help put it together it.

Google is and has been our primary sponsor.

Interestingly, the leading bot language this year seem to be Java, while last years winner, Lisp, isn't among the current top 100 entries any more.

Perhaps, that stems from the fact that Java's starter package implementation was the earliest to be developed and is still today the most mature (besides Python's anyway).

I'm sure that's a huge component.

In order to succeed on this year's contest, you need good path-finding, which you won't be able to do easily in lisp within the time limit.

Why is lisp worse at path-finding?

Lisp isn't worse at path-finding; it's slower at path-finding, simply because it's slower at everything.

Lisp has its place; performance-critical code isn't it.

This is incorrect.

Lisp is not slower at everything.

When properly tweaked it can be pretty close to java in speed.

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