cashto -- cashto@gmail.com -- Chris Ashton -- Seattle, WA

Final strategy:
    1. Depth-first search with lookahead.
    2. Heuristic: maximize the number of adjacent filled cells. (Also maximize the square of the number of filled squares in a line, but that is secondary). 
    3. For each piece, after we find a path for it from the spawn cell to its final destination, go back and insert phrases of power.
    4. Search ply is variable depending on the amount of time left in the run.
    5. Parallelism -- spawn a new thread for every seed we have to process (but if there is only one seed, there is no parallelism).

Lightning strategy: 
    1. Given a piece and a board, generate a set of "goal" states for the piece (heuristic: the more empty spaces at the top of the board, the better).
    2. For each goal state, generate a path (using A*) to that goal state (actually, from end state to start state, and then reverse the path).
    3. Repeat 1 and 2 for each piece, building a tree of possible moves.
    4. Prune the tree to keep only the "n" best solutions found so far.

Soooo many hours wasted in bugs where I confuse absolute coordinates with relative coordinates (e.g., 3 moves NW, 2 moves E) on a hex grid.