SQLillo killer bot

Inspiration

I like competitive puzzle-like programming challenges like this one, so when I saw the challenge I knew that was where I wanted to spend my hours!

What it does

My bot works with a fairly basic code structure, with more in-depth heuristics. Each worker evaluates its surroundings, assigns a score to each possible destination and makes a legal move to get closer to the best destination.

The heuristics include limiting the scanned area to a realistic size (not trying to take over the whole map), detecting collisions and destroying other player's clusters.

How I built it

The challenge forced us to work with Rhai, a rust-based scripting language. All the code is contained in the same file, without the possibility of creating functions.

Challenges I ran into

The language was new for me, so that was a big challenge. The infrastructure was also a little bit crumbly, which represented challenges for the debugging of the code, but in the end the bugs were sorted out :^)

I also iterated through many many versions, more than 20 submitted ones and probably more than 100 unsubmitted!.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud of the win-rate of my bot and learning a new language. At the point of this submission, my bot is finishing 1st nearly all games, but there's still hours to go!

What we learned

I learned the language Rhai and some insight in heuristic codes.

Built With

• rhai