Slashdot Mirror
Solving the Knight's Tour Puzzle In 60 Lines of Python
ttsiod writes "When I was a kid, I used to play the Knight's Tour puzzle with pen and paper: you simply had to pass once from every square of a chess board, moving like a Knight. Nowadays, I no longer play chess; but somehow I remembered this nice little puzzle and coded a 60-line Python solver that can tackle even 100x100 boards in less than a second. Try beating this, fellow coders!"
Though I have better things to do than actually try, looking over the code FTFA, I have to say that I think a transliteration of this code into Scheme or Lisp would actually look cleaner than Python. And I do know that that would deal with the problem the writer ran into, namely that Python has an absurdly low recursion limit.
I do like Python's syntax (for anything under 100 lines of code) but calling it a model of functional programming is just silly.
Is submitter really thinking he is special because he implemented a trivial backtracking algorithm that every first semester CS student has done?
I would truly be amazed to see anyone writing the same logic in C++ in anything less than 3 times the lines of code I wrote in Python. And even if this is somehow possible (using external libraries like BOOST, I'd wager), the code will take longer to write, and it will be far more difficult to comprehend or refactor...
And I'd wager that this guy has never worked on huge projects. Any chunk of code that is less than a hundred lines is not going to be difficult to refactor; in fact, such a short piece of code probably gets longer and more confusing by adding object oriented structure (notice his code isn't encapsulated into a class or anything). The real advantages of structured programming isn't seen until you have a large project that has constantly changing requirements. That is where flexibility REALLY makes a difference.
I would also argue that any modern language gives you everything you need to write good, flexible code, and the quality of the code produced is more closely related to the skill of the programmer, than it is to the programming language itself.
In fact, for myself, it would not be an exaggeration to say I can write more flexible code in assembly now than I could five years ago in any language. Of course, it would be well structured assembly, not the wild mess of code I've written in previous years. YMMV.
Qxe4
Yes, but a lot of this stuff really isn't worth posting online. Espectially Slashdot I have created many algorithms myself without the need to post it for slashdot acceptance. Some interesting compression algorithms, Memory management algorithms... Whatever that I feel like exploring today. But it is for my own personal knowledge not for public viewing of my code as my method will be to prove some particular point to myself nor will it be efficient or complete, and any attempt to have it posted like the guy who posted this thread will just get critized for anything that is not the best as it could possibly be.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Well, here's the thing. Perl was used for _everything_ there for a while, sysadmins who thought they were developers were developing full blown applications in Perl and finding, surprise surprise, that it wasn't real maintainable. So I think we're seeing less of that these days. But Perl is not dying, that's silly. If anything Perl is just being relegated to what it's _really_ good at, and that's UNIX automation tasks and quick throw-away scripts, and _sometimes_ smallish applications. There's really no better language for these types of things.
I take the point of the blog plug was that I shouldn't be able to do it in C++ with 60 lines....
//hence the reason I am waiting for c++0x ;
:(
1 #include <set>
2 #include <iostream>
3 #include <cassert>
4 using namespace std;
5
6 int dx[8]={1,1,-1,-1,2,2,-2,-2}, dy[8]={2,-2,2,-2,1,-1,1,-1};
7 int D[50][50];
8 int N,C;
9
10 #define valid(x,y) ((x>=0) && (x<N) && (y>=0) && (y<N) && (D[x][y]==-1 ) )
11
12 bool show()
13 {
14 for (int i=N;i--;)
15 {
16 for (int j=N;j--;)
17 cout<<"\t"<<D[i][j];
18 cout<<"\n";
19 }
20 return true;
21 }
22
23 bool rec(int x, int y)
24 {
25 D[x][y]=C++;
26 if(C==N*N)
27 return show();
28
29 set< pair<int, pair<int,int> > > poss;
30 for (int r=8;r--;)
31 if(valid(x+dx[r], y+dy[r]))
32 {
33 int neighb=0;
34 for (int t=8;t--;)
35 neighb+= valid(x+dx[r]+dx[t],y+dy[r]+dy[t] );
36 poss.insert( make_pair(neighb, make_pair(x+dx[r],y+dy[r] ) ));
37 }
38
39 for (typeof(poss.begin()) q=poss.begin(); q!=poss.end(); q++)
40 if (rec(q->second.first, q->second.second))
41 return true;
42
43 D[x][y]=-1;
44 C--;
45
46 return false;
47 }
48
49 void solve(int n)
50 {
51 N=n, C=0;
52 memset(D,-1,sizeof(D));
53 assert(rec(0,0))
54 }
55
56 int main()
57 {
58 int n;
59 while((cin>>n) && (n>0))
60 solve(n);
61 return 0;
62 }
The bastards! Those darn brackets force me to have 2 extra lines
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