Where are the game rules

[Aruta]

Maybe i just can't see the obvious. But i can't find game rules. I found "Ants Game Specification", but it doesn't make it an clear.
What is food, hill etc?
Is there a game rules page?

Thanks.

[jmcarthur]

Unfortunately, those are the rules. I'm kind of unhappy with them. It could be so much more detailed and terse. I might try and touch it up or even just write my own version of it and try to get it accepted. The problem is that this spec has been picked over for quite some time now, and major changes to it will require some heavy scrutiny to verify factual correctness, so even if somebody was to pick up this ball immediately it might be a while for things to stabilize. I recommend, in the mean time, asking specific questions on these forums or in the IRC channel.

[paulwal]

jmcarthur,

That would be extremely helpful if you or someone else could rewrite the rules so that it's clear, concise, and organized. The entire website is horribly confusing. I'm tempted to write an AI bot just to decipher the rules.

[spiderx]

It's pretty simple.

A hill is where ants come out. It can be killed by an enemy ant on top of the hill.

Food is for creating more ants. One food = one more ant.

Combat - one ant against another ant = both ants die. One vs Two - the two live, and the one dies.

[FishSpeaker]

[AU.ACM]

[StF00]

Do we have official limits for the game parameters ?

How small could the loadtime and turntime be ?
For the fog or war .. can we have blind ants? .. can we have ants that will see most of the field?
Can we have fights that require contact .. or fights that are resolved so far away, that they involve large clusters of ants?

Knowing official min and max valid values for each of these parameters, would help designing algorithm and storages that can size up to the limit value, but still be able to abort with some result when time is up.

[alphacuregirl]

I had the same experience. Had to have the person who introduced me explain what food is and what the point of the game is, etc. Downloaded C++ and python starter kits and didn't get either working. Seems like part of the competition is to modify the engine and sandbox so that you can run programs on your own computer without needing them to be jailed. Maybe need to download unix to get it to run? lol.

As cool as the game sounds, I don't know if I can participate in something so disorganized, which is liable to be changed in the future.

[BearOff]