In this contest, the only way the players can interact with the game is by moving the ants using the beacons. However, this means that we have to rely on the pathfinding in the referee, which is far from optimal.
For example, you can look at this replay: Coding Games and Programming Challenges to Code Better
The ants take 3 turns to get to the beacons on frames 3-5, even though it’s possible in a single turn.
Moving ants in a straight line in order to create a chain is also not as trivial as one would expect: Coding Games and Programming Challenges to Code Better
… and it gets much, much worse with more beacons/ants - to the point where I expect that placing beacons in a way that avoids the referee bugs will be far more important for a good ranking than e.g. choosing a search algorithm.
TLDR: the pathfinding in “AntAllocater.java” is [insert a non-bannable expletive], which makes it impossible to reliably interact with the game.