About Snake Heuristics

Snake Heuristics is a game for Developers to write a heuristic function, to play the perfect classic game of snake.

The goal is to write a heuristic function that returns a single number. The function is run on every cell on the board, but only the cells around the head of the snake are important. The snake will move to the cell with the lowest number, and will continue to do this while collecting points, until it either crashes or there are no cell left to move to.

If two or more cells have the same lowest number, then the first of those cells clockwise from the top will be chosen.

Finding the balance of accuracy, speed and efficiency is the main challenge. Snake Heuristic's scores solution on all three of these areas. See the scoring section for more information.

You can alter your solution at any point in the game, and see how those changes affect your current position or any position previously in the game... but be careful, if you rewind and make changes to your solution the Butterfly Effect will change how the snake previously moved.

Basically, the fewer moves the snake takes to reach the point the better. The score grows exponentially with the more points collected and the efficiency has a greater weight at the beginning of the game.

Here's an example. The methodical sweep technique is a sure thing to get you the perfect completion, but it is very inefficient so will score very low. A Manhattan Distance is very efficient, but is highly unlikely to get you many points before it crashes.

Solutions submitted to the Leaderboard are run in a cloud environment, where a score is calculated using the same equation used on this client. To submit to the Leaderboard, you need to "Sign in with Github" and once your solution is saved, press "Submit". You will also be able to permanently store solutions in the "My Saved Solutions" area.