ai-code-battle/starters/rust

acb-starter-rust

Rust starter kit for AI Code Battle — a competitive bot programming platform.

Uses axum for the HTTP server with serde for JSON and hmac/sha2 for authentication.

Quick Start

# Run locally
export BOT_SECRET=dev-secret
cargo run

# Run with Docker
docker build -t my-bot .
docker run -e BOT_SECRET=your-secret -p 8080:8080 my-bot

Your bot listens on port 8080 and responds to POST /turn with move commands.

Register Your Bot

Once your bot is deployed and accessible via HTTPS:

curl -X POST https://api.aicodebattle.com/api/register \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "my-rust-bot",
    "endpoint_url": "https://my-bot.example.com",
    "owner": "your-name",
    "description": "My awesome bot"
  }'

Save the bot_id and shared_secret from the response — the secret is shown only once.

Project Structure

src/main.rs  # HTTP server, HMAC auth, game types, and strategy entry point
src/grid.rs  # Grid utilities (toroidal distance, BFS, neighbors)
Cargo.toml   # Rust dependencies
Dockerfile   # Multi-stage container build

Grid Helpers

src/grid.rs provides utility functions for the toroidal grid:

• toroidal_manhattan(a, b, rows, cols) — Manhattan distance with wrap-around
• toroidal_chebyshev(a, b, rows, cols) — Chebyshev distance with wrap-around
• neighbors(pos, rows, cols) — 8-directional neighbors with wrap
• bfs(start, goal, passable, rows, cols) — BFS pathfinding, returns Option<Vec<Position>>

Customization

Edit compute_moves() in src/main.rs to implement your strategy. The GameState struct provides:

• bots — all visible bots (yours and enemies)
• energy — visible energy pickup locations
• cores — visible core positions
• walls — visible wall positions
• you.energy — your current energy count
• you.score — your current score
• config — match parameters (grid size, etc.)

Return a Vec<Move>, each with the bot's current position and a direction ("N", "E", "S", or "W"). Bots not included in the response stay in place.

Protocol

• Endpoint: POST /turn — receives game state JSON, returns moves JSON
• Health: GET /health — must return 200
• Timeout: 3 seconds per turn
• Auth: HMAC-SHA256 via X-ACB-Signature header