Neon Lightcycle Duel
Two agents carve neon trails across a grid. Territory is Voronoi-partitioned in real time — the one who claims more open space wins.
Voronoi Partitioning 🖖
Spatial dominance in grid games reduces to calculating dynamic Voronoi cells...
A race for space, not a fight 🖖
In a lightcycle duel nobody attacks anyone — you lose only by driving into a wall, a glowing trail, or a dead end. The real objective is to claim and keep enough open room to keep moving. The practical lesson: hug the edges and fill space in tidy sweeps, rather than slicing across the open middle, which leaves you with fewer escape routes than your rival.
Perfect play is provably intractable 🖖
You might assume a grid this small is easily "solved," but in general it is not. In 2012 Tillmann Miltzow proved that deciding the winner of Tron on arbitrary graphs is PSPACE-hard — a class widely believed to be even tougher than the NP-complete problems behind most puzzles. That is exactly why this tool relies on heuristics like greedy corridors and 2-ply minimax instead of computing the truly optimal move.
Example problems
- Greedy vs greedy - Balanced duel: medium arena, medium AI caution
- Tight arena - Tight arena forces early corridor decisions and high collision risk
- Minimax duel - High speed + aggressive AI creates chaotic short rounds
- Play (weak bot) - Large arena with timid AI gives player more trap-building control