You know, I didn't even once mention the language I used. Realtime constraints and searching speed were the driving factor here; you have to return a move in u

You know, I didn't even once mention the language I used. Realtime constraints and searching speed were the driving factor here; you have to return a move in under one second. I didn't want to risk GC pauses, and I'm not good enough with Haskell to guarantee I'm writing fast code. Otherwise I probably would have used something else, but I don't consider it all that important. Really, there wasn't anything too complicated data-structure-wise to do. In fact it does next to no dynamic allocation. I wanted to use destructive updates for speed when doing a backtracking search on a map. The hard part was just implementing various recursive algorithms, and C++ didn't really get in the way of doing it except that it would have been nice to have multiple return values. I did have some problems throughout the contest with my choice of C++ -- in fact without Valgrind, my entry may never have run correctly. (Turns out one of my algorithms was "escaping" off the border of the map and scribbling in RAM) But hey, I've been dealing with problems like that for more years than I care to count right now.