• Snake built for the 2023 spring RBC BattleSnake competition, second place winner
• Reached 16th in global standard ladder and 17th in duels
• Snake uses paranoid Minimax algorithm with alpha-beta pruning for decision making, allowing the Ai to have up to 7 steps look ahead
• Behavior is determined by heuristics, such as using flood fill to score each possible outcome

• The name of the snake is Orion's Fang, inspired by the Orion constellation
• Orion's Fang is an aggressive but rational snake, quite experienced in area control and edge killing
• Can often overthink and panic, killing itself in the process

Orion's Fang showing his area control capabilities against CoolSnake!

• Debugging the Minimax decision tree using simple debuggers proved to be a nightmare, so it was decided that a visual representation of the tree was needed
• The visual decision tree given a game state, render all possible game state of each snakes up to the max depth
• The game boards are displayed as board with 0 being empty cells, 1 being food, 2 being snake head and letters to represent snake body
• Each possible game state is assigned a value and a chosen move which will be moved upwards for the root game state to choose

The visual tree at depth 2

• Coded with Python 3, libraries such as Matplotlib and Networkx were used for creating the visual decision tree
• Deployed using DigitalOcean