[Community Puzzle] Twixt-PP

https://www.codingame.com/multiplayer/bot-programming/twixt-pp

Send your feedback or ask for help here!

Created by @EricSMSO,validated by @trictrac,@jacek1 and @LeRenard.
If you have any issues, feel free to ping them.

In case you want to learn more about the beauty and complexity of Twixt:
Cf. http://www.lamsade.dauphine.fr/… or https://www.researchgate.net/…

I have just realized that if the player’s code crashes, the referee will just say “timeout”. I wonder if I can fix this, catch the exception and display some helpful debug information.

I just want to update this information. The first link here has gone away. I prefer to avoid direct links, but search for the Twixt page on BoardGameGeek which has lots of forum discussions, and is a hub for lots of other links. There was also a blog post by Dr. Eric Silverman dated 19 March 2020.
Regarding your draw condition in the rules, I see why you limited the board size to 12x12. Did any bot battle here actually result in a draw? If one bot were to start filling up its own border rows before the common playing area is filled, it could wind up with no legal move before the opposing player has filled their border rows. Extremely trivial, but possible.
Is any of the source code here available to the public? Thanks very much! My email is twixtfanatic atsymbol gmail period com

Here is an update for the broken link: http://perso.ens-lyon.fr/edouard.bonnet/publi/connection-games.pdf

Thanks for setting up this competition. I had fun writing my program. My entry is a convolutional neural network (17 hidden layers of 16 channels, 3x3 convolution, resnet architecture).