Neon Lightcycle Duel

The coloured split looks like a Voronoi diagram, and it is one — but the distance it measures is moves through open cells, not the straight line. The moment a trail is down, the two stop resembling each other. Take a 22×22 grid, run a trail along the middle column and leave one gap in the bottom row: the cell two squares across is 44 moves away — twenty-one down, two over, twenty-one back up. Twenty-two times further than it looks. A wall you can see over is still a wall you must drive around, which is why the overlay redraws the instant either cycle turns, and why Voronoi sits in the dropdown as a strategy rather than as decoration.

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.

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.