Hey, I'm the one who built this particular challenge!

I had no clue, but thanks for the book lead! It didn't come up directly, but SimCity 2000 and especially SimCity 4 had a huge impact on me growing up / I still spin up SimCity 4 from time to time, so I imagine there's a massive indirect influence haha.

Will Wright gave at least one great lecture at SIGGRAPH. Wonderful thinker and communicator. #ACM plz unlock this culture.

Ants have fascinated me from a young age, I’d construct a viewing platform so I could watch the hive at work.

My favorite were the carpenter ants, so smart. It feels like they have a theory of mind. I didn’t hurt them, but if you disturbe their nest under a board, the efficiency and expediency they would exhibit while collecting their young was fascinating.

*edit, I meant to ask if you had any other book recommendations?

Speaking of SimAnt, I soon discovered the bug that by moving into the top corner, the black ants would conquer all squares with no intervention from that one sideways and downwards and too easily win the game.

Still, it was fun just messing around with the ants, watching the trails, and chasing spiders by calling forth all ants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimAnt

It's assembly for people who can code good.. and can do other things good too.

It needs to be at least three times this size!

ant-ssembly to be precise

Incredible low contrast font color in use there. Looks like about 0x002000 on pure black (per Mk-1 eyeball).

What possesses people to go for these barely perceptible color schemes?

.. a few minutes later ..

Ok, the crazy low contrast was on the initial landing page. Things have somewhat improved after prodding somewhat blindly at it.

I'll let the question stand though, bc why do that for what's going to be people's first impression?

try pressing any key or clicking around :)

there is a `theme set` command

i think this took me (1 person) like 40 hours max? all built in the last week, though i spent more time than i should have on it haha. quite ai-assisted, that's how most of the layout like the editor, player controls, even eval server got set up.

i spent way too much time on things like the language itself, map generation, and figuring how to only recompute the sim on material code changes vs whitespace and comments (it assembles to "bytecode" with debouncing! and the sim component takes the bytecode as a prop).

we'll see if good ROI, we definitely intend to run more of these types of challenges in the future, so much of this work won't go to waste

There's also a trip to Hawaii in it for you.

People like doing cool stuff

And (potentially) go to Hawaii!

But in all seriousness, ants are smarter than they look. They operate as a collective. Just in the same way that assembly needs to operate collectively to get the best output.

They're more closely linked than they appear from the outside ;)

the answer is my editor doesn't have spellcheck and i apparently don't know english as well as i thought, fixing :')

on the home page (dev.moment.com) you can type `theme -h` and then `theme set [name]` to change the color scheme, which carries forward to the sim!

The prizes (Maui trip, second/third prizes, swag kits, shipping for the swag kits) probably cost around $20k in total.

Assuming an engineer costs $200k/year, 200 effective working days per year, that's 1k/day. Developing the contest (from the idea to building the rules to building the site to playtesting) likely cost more than 20 eng-days, making it the biggest cost.

Hiring is expensive. If it takes 30 minutes to screen one candidate for suitability for the "real" interview and 5h to do a "real" interview (including evaluation etc.), 5 screenings for one interview-worthy candidate and 5 interviews for one hire (I suspect the real factors might be closer to 10), that's 12.5h of screening and 25h of interviewing per hire.

It's less about the money. It's about giving people a chance to do something fun / show off their skills and get rewarded for it.

Plus, Hawaii is awesome.

Way less than you would pay for a recruiter

they usually ask for a non trivial percentage of the first year salary