This project started as a mind exercise, when I asked myself what the largest theoretical score in this game could be. Before I started this, I read in a few places opinions about high score routes, but there was no evidence if these where the optimum solutions. So I told myself, this is a nice project to work on my programming skills in rust and in exploring algorithms for solving this.
This is the first attempt and there is no logic, only brute force is used. In the first step, all possible routes are explored (starting from Edinburgh if I remember correctly) and then all these possible routes are scored, and then I get the highest score. I' not sure that this is correct, it seems to bring routes that are valid and that have large scores, but each time I run it I get a different result of maximum number of routes.
Also one this that is odd is that the number of routes and the maximum score route is different if I run the program in debug mode or in release mode, I'm not sure if something like that should happen.
After tackling this problem, I am thinking of checking solutions in other games too, or tackling this same problem with different algorithms, maybe genetic algorithms?