Hello every one i am currently writing an ai task given to me at my university. I want to represent the Sternhalma star shaped board also called chinese checkers as a data structure. I am coding the ai in rust. I already did a lot of progress. I finished few stages of the challenge. My agent is doing fairly okay. But my end game is to code a good agent.

Currently i am using a hashmap to represent my board. it was good but when i do the search also to evaluate my state properly my code is not efficient. I am thinking maybe hashmap is the problem. also my first choice was hashmap because the chinese checkers coordinate system was at first a little confusing. Any suggestions on what type of data structures to use to do efficeint search(minmax, alpha beta pruning). also now i want to shift from hash map representation because i want to use transposition tables for the end game and with hash map i am not sure whether i can do that any suggestions on a good board representation is welcome. i am also thinking of using a ndarray(ndarray crate) but is normal array good enough or ndarray works ?

I treid Ndarray, but any other i want efficient representation for piece look up and board evaluation.