A lot of the time it's just catching strays from blocklists because you're 3 degrees of separation away from someone deemed problematic

Now I'm wondering if I should try for 500 stars... 🤔

Had to implement a force-directed graph drawing algorithm in GameMaker of all things just to visualize this nicely lol

Yep! This is a timelapse of the positions of all my active trials at step N, with green trails eventually reaching the solution

The wrong trails terminate early if they ever reach a [square x direction] combination where a previous trail in the same state had a more optimal score

I've been doing all the puzzles (and accompanying visuals) in the GameMaker engine this year, just to up the difficulty for myself and to learn how to use the draw/step functions... it does make me miss good old Python and C++ though 😅

Just realized I could have the robot movements be smooth so gonna go redo it

Yep, it traverses the perimeter of the field itself and records how many times it changes direction, as well as the perimeter of any holes inside the field (which threw me off for quite a bit!)