My saboteur ants, among other things, are supposed to make the queen go OMGWTFBBQ and spawn a bunch of worker ants to try to counterraid a nonexistent enemy queen

@Alion since each unit depends on being a triplet, 4 worker types might be enough to have the queen in a triplet with 2 worker types, and 3 worker types that go off as a separate unit, all doing the Langton dance. Just need to find a way to make one of the worker types dual purpose...

(please don't interpret this as a demand for more work - I already find it amazing someone got Langton's ant to work at all)

Langon + Wildfire

@trichoplax Mmm... So your suggestion is to make just 2 triplets, correct? Looks fairly doable.

Though there's an issue in general with multiple triplets - how to make them not crash and burn when meeting each other...

By the way, I think I found a more sophisticated version of Langton's ant that utilizes just one ant (but each cell is 3x3, so it's nowhere near as fast and doesn't have as interesting interactions as the original).

> langon

@Draco18s | langdon

(@ASCII-only how do you make that quote line thingy?)

@Alion hover over message -> the arrow on the right

@GNiklasch Ooh. Looking forward to it...

@GNiklasch Woah. That looks great. Kinda reminds me of @eaglgenes101's saboteurs.

Pattern shifter? Copier? Hmm... Something very interesting, at any rate.

right, shifting everything by one cell position, done by two cooperating ants

Aha! Monorail's rail was pretty much a dead giveaway.

@GNiklasch oh okay I thought you were just goona paint random copies of other entries patterns

(which would be pretty bad for me)

no @dzaima, I leave it to each entrant's own workers to paint misplaced copies of their own key patterns ;)

Random idea: spoon-feed dzaima's or my own pattern detector all patterns in existence and make it randomly fill them in.

Meh, looked more interesting in my head. It'd probably just stick to one of them for the entire game unless some serious precautions were taken...

Advanced sabotage?

Also, the rail based entries are quite hard to mislead

@eaglgenes101 esolangs.org/wiki/Rail :P

@Alion random worse idea: when you find a pattern, extend it in a malicious way/destroy it in the most efficient way possible

@ASCII-only Huh. Well, the logical extreme of this idea would be a hitman, right...?

Railworkers are unafraid to bulldoze rails they think are wrong, and they usually have 6 or more colored cells to back them

It takes two to mislead a railworker

@Alion Yes, I had trouble typing when I posted that. I had "landone" at one point.

@Draco18s I was referencing the fact that you're consistently spelling it "Langdon" (when it's clearly supposed to be "Langton").

Because I am bad at remembering that :B

@Alion I was thinking if you can get it to work once you can keep spawning new triplets

@trichoplax But you do realize that the queen doesn't collect much food when she's doing Langton's routine, right?

When does The Formation 1.3 get cracking? It fixes overspawning as seen in The Formation 1.2, and cleans up sabotage heuristics

@eaglgenes101 It's been running for 50 hours and The Formation is in 17th place with 5.15 after being in 724 of the 1225 tournament games so far

@Alion Yeah, I know multiple triples isn't really of any practical value

@eaglgenes101 The previous version of The Formation has now been disqualified in an older parallel tournament. I'm not excluding it from the newer tournament since that's a version of The Formation that has been edited since. Just letting you know the details in case there's still anything further that needs editing:

> Cannot create new worker on top of food.

> Input: [{"color":1,"food":0,"ant":{"food":0,"type":2,"friend":true}},{"color":2,"food":‌​1,"ant":null},{"color":8,"food":0,"ant":null},{"color":1,"food":0,"ant":null},{"c‌​olor":8,"food":0,"ant":{"food":13,"type":5,"friend":true}},{"color":1,"food":0,"a‌​nt":{"food":0,"type":3,"friend":true}},{"color":1,"food":0,"ant":null},{"color":1‌​,"food":0,"ant":null},{"color":1,"food":0,"ant":null}]

> Response: {"cell":1,"type":1}

I have a sneaking suspicion that this big might still exist in 1.3; I'll go try it out when I get home

Sure

I spotted the problem

1.3.1 is going up, along with a further reduced spawnrate to try to prevent problems

Wait shoot Formation is more problematic than I thought