Bantay

Created by team solid on July 11, 2026
Unicorn Track

Bantay is a GPU-powered digital twin that helps farms fight pests without breeding the resistance that makes pesticides useless. Insecticide resistance is a multi-billion-dollar problem: spraying hard kills pests today, but selects for resistant genes so the chemicals fail tomorrow. Bantay runs an adversarial simulation on AMD Instinct GPUs with ROCm. An adaptive pest agent moves, forages, and evolves using published mathematical models of dispersal and resistance, while a farmer agent learns to suppress the outbreak through just three limited, noisy field sensors — a fog-of-war view of a fraction of the field. Crucially, the farmer is rewarded for keeping resistance low, not only for killing pests, so its recommendations stay effective season after season. Because the farmer's strategy is hardened against an opponent that actively evades and adapts, its spray-and-scout plans are robust in the real world. A dashboard visualizes the spreading outbreak, the sensor coverage, and the resistance trend — turning a hard agronomic tradeoff into an actionable, resistance-aware plan for precision agriculture.

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