I mean, it's just a fancy hydrocarbon, and in some form or another can be extracted from female mammal urine.
I imagine there's a way to genetically alter yeasts to make estrobeer while they're at it, with the side benefit that the alcohol would serve as a natural testosterone reducer for a double d whammy.
I put a lot of work trying to make it as smooth as possible. But there's still some rough edges I think, have to play test it more with friends, just the amount of different assumptions that people bring to a tutorial and trying to handle all of them without being overwhelming is such a tricky balance to get right haha
Thanks for organizing this! I had a great time playing with the system for a week even though I did not get anywhere close to the prize pool.
I have no idea if anyone checks these threads after a week but not that it's over, I am super curious what strategies other folks used. I used a python script to pre-process my programs to minimize jumps and downloaded the sim to run an iterative optimizer with parallelization. I just put a little writeup and the code on github https://github.com/Will-Morr/MomentSwarm.
I just came back to check if anyone else was discussing their entry, so thanks for posting your write up!
I wrote mine by hand just testing it using the in-browser simulator. I initially used subroutines to try to keep things structured but then resorted to inlining most things (and flattening as much state as I could to bare registers) to try to speed things up, though i never quite got my ants to always move within the 64 op step.
Interesting that you didn't use dead reckoning at all to return to the nest. I didn't think I could get away with that. And somehow using a second channel to extend the trails never occurred to me.
Thanks to everyone in this chain for sharing! I've learned so much from your programs and was inspired to make my repo public and do a write up as well. I was 52nd place with a score of 599.
I'm just now (last few months) dabbling with agentic coding, but being an oldschool tech guy I had to dive straight into assembly. It was just too hard for me to level up my agentic skills given the deadline.
This challenged coincided with my first dabblings into agentic coding. I wrote all my attempts in hand coded assembly, without doing any basic research. but your site is very entertaining and is reminding me of why the connection of ants/swarms cellular automata to gradient discovery to AI always blows my mind
I've been working on a surprisingly similar project for the last week: plants grow cells on a grid by executing a raw chunk of memory according to a simple instruction set. I'm aiming more for an evolution simulator, where each plant gets a 1kb brain that is randomized a little when a new plant is spawned.
Most plants right now settle into a simple goto loop that places the requisite cells to survive and then spam seeds until they die. I have seen some interesting variety in body plans emerge where plants sort into discrete species regionally. I'm hoping to eventually get decision making to emerge organically. If things go well this system is theoretically capable of sexual selection (and maybe fisherian runaway) but that's a pipe dream right now.
Very nice visualization, the fade out really adds to the organic feel.
I've been playing with a similar system but designed for 3d printing, it's simple to make it self-supporting by just drawing a line from each parent to each child which is neat.
Since IP law is apparently dead, does anyone want to invest in my ai generated novel startup where it just spits out Harry Potter verbatim but uses a bunch of power to do so.
The bee movie, but every frame was passed through an AI to make it Ghibli style, the audio was turned into a transcript by a transcribing AI and then turned into audio by a TTS AI.
Very low code. Infinite scale. Name a better AI startup to invest.
Robot slaves is a funny phrase if you consider that the origin of the word robot literally is a term that meant slave or "forced work". Language doing circles.
Not only that, but in Russian, the equivalent word for verb "work" (as in "go work" or "do work"), is "rabotay", which is derived from the word "rab" which is the word "slave". So "to work" is literally "to slave", in Russian (and quite a few slavic languages). An English speaker may categorize this as a linguistic anachronism, but a slavic speaker would categorize this as linguistic honesty.
This is pretty common. In Hebrew aved means both "work" and "slavery" and you have the same in Arabic and other semitic languages. In Ancient Egyptian "bak" is used for both "servant" and "worker". The ambiguity in the Hebrew is why many references to this are translated as "servile labor" in the King James, as they were uncertain of the sense of the term meant, or perhaps correctly guessed that both senses were meant. In many ancient languages, e.g. ancient egyptian "worker" and "slave" were synonyms. In modern parlance "slavery" or "servitude" is viewed as an unspeakable evil and people are shocked that there is linguistic overlap with neutral terms like "work" or "labor", which are just ubiquitous parts of life, but historically this is quite common and it is true all around the world, for example in German "knecht" means both "servant" and "farm hand", and in Latin "minister" meant "servant" or "subordinate" (as opposed to "magister"), just like in english you have "server", "serve", "servant", "servile". In Sanskrit "dasa" originally meant "foreigner" or "enemy" and then later "slave" but over time it has come to be used as a suffix to denote someone who "serves" a diety voluntarily, e.g. "Ramdas". In Ancient Japanese you have "yakko" for a low status worker or servant, and later that evolved to footmen who carried baggage for samurai.
Wait until you find out what the word 'ciao' meant in the original Italian/Latin: 'ORIGIN: Italian dial. alt. of schiavo (I am your) slave from medieval Latin sclavus slave.'
Well they're not an alternative, so I suppose not. No one is being chained to a desk and made to author reports on how their department is aligning with the new business growth strategy. And the robot slaves aren't being designed to mine precious minerals or attach buttons to clothes.
The lesson that I am taking away from AI companies (and their billionaire investors and founders), is that property theft is perfectly fine. Which is a _goofy_ position to have, if you are a billionaire, or even a millionaire. Like, if property theft is perfectly acceptable, and if they own most of the property (intellectual or otherwise), then there can only be _upside_ for less fortunate people like us.
The implicit motto of this class of hyper-wealthy people is: "it's not yours if you cannot keep it". Well, game on.
(There are 56.5e6 millionaires, and 3e3 billionaires -- making them 0.7% of the global population. They are outnumbered 141.6 to 1. And they seem to reside and physically congregate in a handful of places around the world. They probably wouldn't even notice that their property is being stolen, and even if they did, a simple cycle of theft and recovery would probably drive them into debt).
It's fascinating how he has fully outsourced his conscience to the TikTok content guidelines. With all of the discussion about what restrictions should exist on platforms it never ever occurred to me that people would start to view them as moral authorities.
I've recently starting posting again on my project blog https://willmorrison.net. Someone else shared my most recent thing here and I wound up sticking around.
I've actually done clear prints with LEDs installed. The bottom is much brighter than the top and it just look kinda tacky. I briefly hollowed out the supports and tried running fiber optics but it didn't help much.
I'm realizing now that I tried a lot of weird shit during this project that just did not work at all or make it into the final product, I should do another video just of all my failed abomination marble runs.
Minor suggestion/request: would be great if you added a final STL file to the github repo of a working example. Might be easier for people to try if they can't get the python code running on Linux.
(I haven't tried yet. But I'd love to just send an STL to my printer to see how well it prints.)