* Entelect Challenge 2018 - Tower Defence - Rustbot

This is the source code for my [[https://challenge.entelect.co.za/][Entelect Challenge]] 2018 bot. It did
really well, coming in 3rd place in the finals.

** How does it work?

I've put together a blog post with the high level overview of how I
got to this point and how it works [[https://www.offerzen.com/blog/coding-for-the-win-how-i-built-a-tower-defence-bot][here]]. I will be putting up more
articles diving into the details shortly.

The short explanation is that it's a Monte Carlo Tree Search. All
possible moved I can make from the first state are generated. I then
iterate through the list of possible moved and play random games that
start with that move. The move that statistically wins the most random
games is taken as the best move.

** Environment Setup

The Rust compiler tool-chain can be downloaded from the Rust project
website.

https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/install.html

** Compilation

The bot is written in Rust, and compiled using Cargo. For the sake of
running the bot in the tournament, you have to compile using the
~--release~ flag (this is specified in [[./bot.json]]).

#+BEGIN_SRC shell
    cargo build --release
#+END_SRC

After compilation, there will be an executable in ~target/release/~.

** Other useful commands

You can find other interesting commands that I used in writing the bot
in the [[./Makefile]]. Some notable ones are:

- ~make bench~: compiles with the benchmarking feature turned on, and
  runs my end to end benchmark.
- ~make profile~: similar to the benchmark, but runs single threaded,
  for a longer time, and uses ~perf~ to gather statistics on the run.
- ~make submission.zip~: Creates the zip file to upload to the
  Entelect Challenge servers.

** License

See [[./license.org]]