@PelleLundkvist Hoppemaur is doing fairly well for a single queen doing a somewhat self-avoiding random walk after two games here. Ended with 20-something food both times, in the same ballpark as Claustrophobic Queen and several others, for an average score of 7.5 so far.

Two things I noticed: She sometimes spends more time then she should in already-painted areas (eg. by Wildfire) where no food is expected to be left; and she can get stuck in areas containing yellow and cyan cells which are out of step with her own pattern (such as can be encountered on the walls of Windmill shafts). One example of the latter, using trichoplax's original controller, occurs near the end with seed 1038.

- The Windmill pattern qualityGoal and weight are partly due to planning, part due to bug fixing when Plan A turned out not to work. (-: I did keep pinning down the seeds so as to keep problem cases reproducible until the code dealt with them properly. (And I spent more than a week sorting out the initial scramble phase before even starting to build rails etc.)

(screenshot of the end of that seed 1038 run, since you won't want to wait for 30000 moves of the original controller on your machine)

(the queen kept circling around near the middle of this region)

Here, the yellow and cyan cells a chess-knight's move to the queen's right come from a Windmill shaft wall, as does the red cell she's standing on and the black cells above and below her. When she now steps northeast or southeast, she won't paint that cell yellow because the misaligned yellow and cyan cells further E seem to confuse her.

But without painting these cells yellow, she won't overpaint the red and black cells with cyan (like she did to the formerly-red cell four cells N of where she currently is).

@PelleLundkvist my controller has ways for you to locate ants, but I doubt it will run as fast as Daves controller.

@PelleLundkvist I'm now running this code on the tournament machine with all of the currently included players (that is, all except Firefly and Steamroller Ants). This should give an idea of how it will do when it is posted to the competition - will take a few days to see how it moves on the leaderboard though.

I really want to make another bot because it's so fun, but all the good ideas are done already :/

I guess I could try to do something with Sliding Miners, but that would require running a couple tournaments replacing Rail Miners to see its cons, and that can take a while..