Looks very cool! I have a question - with AI nowadays that can dominate pretty much any board game - is there any hope for anyone 'hand coding' a strategy here against someone who just trains an AI model. How does the problem space change in a game such as this where it may be 1v8 opponents vs a 1v1 game such as chess I wonder
Some competitions like this only give you a certain amount of "cycles" per turn, so hand written solutions would have an "advantage" in that sense. I don't know if that method is applicable to this particular game though, since the processing is done by the user.
From what I found in their documentation, the limitation is latency. Your server can use whatever compute cycles it wants to formulate a decision for a single turn, but if it doesn't respond with sub 250ms latency then the snake just carries on in its current direction instead of making a move that turn.