Very plainly: no, hand coding is not going to be able to compete with a fully developed ML/AI agent. Even simple hand coded agents use AI techniques such as minimax, which is fundamentally an "AI" technique even though most people today don't really think about it that way since there are no deep neural networks involved.
However, this contest looks unpopular enough that you can likely still compete because no one has spent the effort to actually build a proper deep-neural-network agent, etc.
You can work out the problem space yourself by simply calculating all the possible board states. Or you could calculate the move states (3 moves per player, to the power of the average number of turns).
However, this contest looks unpopular enough that you can likely still compete because no one has spent the effort to actually build a proper deep-neural-network agent, etc.
You can work out the problem space yourself by simply calculating all the possible board states. Or you could calculate the move states (3 moves per player, to the power of the average number of turns).