The 7 turn game that could not be solved

Snekagon is a two-player abstract game: 91 hexagonal cells, seven turns each, longest snake wins. It feels like a game a computer should solve in an evening. It isn't. This is the story of the game, the engine and exact solver we built for it, hundreds of hours of computing on a single opening, and a saving move the engine ranked only 76th. ▶ Play against the engine or analyse any position in your browser: https://boltkey.github.io/snekagon-lab ▶ Get the game (wooden edition by Maty Moves): https://matymoves.com/produkt/snekagon/ ▶ All code for the video, the engine and the solver: https://github.com/BoltKey/snekagon-lab Chapters 0:00 Cold open 1:01 Who I am 1:31 The idea 2:58 Out into the world 4:07 The rules 5:43 Where the strategy hides 7:08 The question that would not go away 8:16 Teaching a machine to play 10:02 Trying to solve it 12:39 One opening, 1,589 replies 15:29 The game hidden behind move 76 17:49 Why it is so hard 19:38 Human intuition versus the cold machine 21:46 What we know Made by Adam Španěl Engine, solver and the Manim code of this video written by Claude Opus 5.5 (Anthropic) Animated with Manim (manim.community). Thank you, Grant Sanderson (3Blue1Brown), for creating it. Go position: AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol, game 4 (2016), up to move 78. #boardgames #gamedesign #abstractgames #gametheory #manim