BrilliANT: The Winner Entry of the GECCO’2007 Ant Wars Contest

BriliANT is the name of a program that won the GECCO’2007 Ant Warscontest. Ant Wars was one of the competitions organized within GECCO’2007,Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, in London, England, July7–12, 2007. The goal was to evolve a controller for a virtual ant that collectsfood in a square toroidal grid environment in the presence of a competing ant. Ina sense, this game is an extension of the so-called Santa-Fe trail task, a populargenetic programming benchmark.An Ant Wars game takes place on a square toroidal grid of size 11x11. Atthe beginning of the game, the two opponent ants are placed at predeterminedboard locations. The starting coordinates of Ant 1 and Ant 2 are (5,2) and(5,8), respectively.Before game starts, 15 pieces of food are randomly distributed over theboard. No piece of food can be located in ants’ starting cells.Each ant has a limited field of view (FOV) consisting of a square neigh-borhood of size 5x5 centered at its current location. An ant receives completeinformation about the states of all cells within FOV (empty, food, enemy).The game lasts for 35 moves per each player. Ant 1 moves first. If an antmoves into an empty cell, nothing happens. If an ant moves into a cell withfood, it scores 1 point and the cell is emptied. If an ant moves into the celloccupied by the opponent, it kills the opponent: no points are scored but onlythe survivor can go on collecting food until the end of the game. A game is wonby the ant that reaches the highest score. In case of a tie, Ant 1 is the winner.As the game outcome strongly depends on the actual food distribution, thegames are grouped into matches. Each match lasts 5 games. The match winneris the first player to win 3 games. In the first four games of a match contestantstake roles of Ant 1 and Ant 2 alternatively. In the 5th game the player with thehighest total score in the first 4 games plays Ant 1. In case both players havereached the same total score, the player with the highest score in a single gameplays Ant 1. If a further tie occurs, the ants are assigned randomly.