OKC Edmonders

James Gray Tim Nordloh Ed Livengood Luke DeWitt

This is a pretty normal search of all possible moves with moderate pruning. See pruned_search() and prune?() in src/lib/lambda_dash/search.rb for the main thinking code. The prioritize_moves() method in the same file pushes us down higher scoring lines faster, which isn't perfect but still seems to help more than it hurts. These three methods are really our brain, so we're getting the results we're getting with less than 50 lines of code.

Something that might surprise you is that this Ruby code uses some functional programming inspired tricks. Each Cell in our Map is an immutable object and we replace them with new objects as we make changes. This allows for a surprisingly quick copy of even large maps, since the copy just points to the same objects for the most part. Of course, Ruby's no speed demon and we lose plenty of time in other areas.

We named this code Lambda Dash after the Boulder Dash game that we assume was your inspiration for the problem.