Logical Fun

Spent a good few hours today, and a bunch more this week on the Imagine Cup Algorithm Challenge - which is pretty damn hard, but also good fun - really makes you think. The first match is over on the 22nd of December, and I think I came in a bit late to have much of a chance of getting near the top 50, I'm currently stuck down somewhere near 300th (out of a couple of thousand) on the leaderboard, and I doubt I'm going to triple my score within the next day or two.

The precept of match 1 is pretty simple - you control a little robot, called Herbert, and you have to get him around a map as efficiently as possible. Each map contains both white and grey buttons, you complete the map by collecting all of the white buttons - but if you touch a grey button, all the white buttons become unpressed. I'm sure that on (at least) one of the later levels, I'll have to tell him to walk through a few grey buttons before going on his final run through the whites - which is a fairly novel gameplay concept, but currently those last few levels just scare me.



The catch, of course, is that the only things that herbert understands are 'turn right', 'turn left' and 'go straight', and that telling him any one of these commands requires using a 'byte' of information - and each level has a limited number of bytes you're allowed to use to solve it. So, lots of recursive algorithms and equations are called for to finish the level under the byte limit - very tricky at times indeed.

Good fun for those of you who enjoy maths, coding or just general logic puzzles, and there'll be three more matches coming up in the Algorithm Challenge, the last one of which ends mid-february, if you finish in the top 50 in any of them you get to go on to round 2, and if you're one of the top 6 in your country then, you get to go to Korea for the international finals and the chance to win a few thousand dollars. Nice. Just wondering if it's going to be North or South Korea though....

Off to listen to The Supremes and read A Song Of Stone by Iain Banks now, ciao.

Xx