Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language
We built an ant colony simulation as an internal hiring challenge at Moment and decided to open it up publicly. You write a program in a custom assembly-like (we call it ant-ssembly) instruction set that controls 200 ants. Each ant can sense nearby cells (food, pheromones, home, other ants) but has no global view. The only coordination mechanism is pheromone trails, which ants can emit and sense them, but that's it. Your program runs identically on every ant. The goal is to collect the highest percentage of food across a set of maps. Different map layouts (clustered food, scattered,…
In plain words
Swarm is an ant colony simulation where participants write programs in a custom assembly language to control 200 ants competing to collect food. Each ant can only sense its immediate surroundings and coordinate through pheromone trails, with no global awareness. The same program runs on every ant, requiring strategies that produce emergent collective behavior. Players are ranked on how much food their colony gathers across different map layouts. The challenge is designed as a programming puzzle that rewards creative problem-solving through decentralized control.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
We built an ant colony simulation as an internal hiring challenge at Moment and decided to open it up publicly. You write a program in a custom assembly-like (we call it ant-ssembly) instruction set that controls 200 ants. Each ant can sense nearby cells (food, pheromones, home, other ants) but has no global view. The only coordination mechanism is pheromone trails, which ants can emit and sense them, but that's it. Your program runs identically on every ant. The goal is to collect the highest percentage of food across a set of maps. Different map layouts (clustered food, scattered, obstacles) reward very different strategies. The leaderboard is live. Grand prize is a trip to Maui for two paid for by Moment. Challenge closes March 12. Curious what strategies people discover. We've seen some surprisingly clever emergent behavior internally.
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