Combat strategy for ants

Question

This question refers to the Google-sponsored AI Challenge, a contest that happens every few months and in which the contenders need to submit a bot able to autonomously play a g

Answer 1

My question is substantially about complexity. I thought to this problem extensively, but I still couldn't come up with an acceptable way to calculate the optimal set of moves in a reasonable time.

Exactly!

It's an AI competition. AI deals with problems which are too complex to be solved with optimal algorithms.

So you have to try "stuff", like your idea about centers of gravity. Even better would be some genetic algorithms where better strategies are found through natural selection (but it's hard to set up some evolving "framework" for that).

BTW: you can see the blog of the current leader and his strategy is surprisingly simple.