Post by itestra

Two days of coding, a high-performance Rust backend, and a tournament that came down to a sub-second photo finish. At our recent hackathon in Aachen, teams built autonomous bots for a multiplayer variant of Snake. The challenge required real-time pathfinding, resource management, and adapting to the actions of competing bots. We provided a Rust backend for the game logic, while teams were free to implement their clients locally in any language. Throughout the event, teams set up their own test arenas, benchmarked strategies, and, in many cases, coded through the night. The tournament produced several exceptionally close matches. One late-night game required detailed replay analysis to determine the winner after a finish separated by less than a second. The final remained undecided until the closing moments, with the lead changing hands shortly before the end.