Coding chess
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At university I had an introductory C course where one assignment was to write a program that searched a 4x4 array of booleans for groups of cells set to true. Groups had to be rectangles, powers of 2 in width and height, and could wrap (i.e. they could go off the right edge and back on the left edge). We had to submit our programs by e-mail and printed form one week later. The prof. marked the paper versions and the TA ran and tested the digital. One slight problem, if you used the university owned printers, they charged for print outs. A few pence per page to cover costs and stop people abusing the rather nice high quality printers the computer faculty had.
I'd always enjoyed programming and whilst C was new to me, using another language wasn't a big problem. As I worked on it I realised the problem wasn't as straightforward as I first thought, but I spent a few hours on it that evening and had a solution I was happy with.
Penny was a student on the course whose approach to academia was memorization. She didn't consume, process, and apply concepts. She just remembered them. Her favourite subject was maths. While the rest of us were struggling to derive some formula, she'd have just committed the process to memory.
Penny was complaining a lot on this programming assignment. She didn't understand why the assignment was so hard for an introductory class. I didn't judge. I know some people find programming hard, but I didn't feel I could help her much without jeopardising my own mark. There's only so much uniqueness in a small program and if she just copied my solution we'd both get penalised for plagiarism. I did mention to her the cases I'd found tricky to get right was when two groups overlapped. If one group completely covered a smaller one you'd only report the bigger one, but if not you'd report both groups.
I heard, through her boyfriend, that that week had involved many long evenings working on this assignment, but she turned up at the next class solution in hand. Obviously stressed, she carried a pile of paper of several hundred pages. She had written a program that consisted of an if-statement for every possible group size and location. About a hundred different possible groups. Each condition written with constant value indices into the array. To cope with the overlapping groups problem, checks for smaller groups also checked that no larger group also covered this area. No loops. No search algorithm. Just a linear program of if-statements.
Apparently debugging this has been a nightmare. Cut and paste errors everywhere, but when I'd told her about overlapping groups aspect it had blown her mind. There always seemed to be a combination she hadn't accounted for. Multiple times she thought she was done, only to find a corner case she'd missed. And just to kick her when she was down, she'd paid for multiple printouts, each one costing about £10 only to find a problem afterwards.
This consistent A grade student who sailed through everything by relying on her memory had been broken by being asked to create an algorithm rather than remember one. She got credit for submitting a solution that compiled and solved some cases, but I doubt the professor got past the first page of that huge printout.
Penny had worked really hard for that D.
Professor was an idiot if it gave a D for a working solution. Getting it working is the grade, optimizing is the next step.
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This post did not contain any content.wrote on last edited by [email protected]
They are doing it dumb. You can text output chess but you just need to keep track of where the pieces are in code, then when you are ready to output, place the characters. Saves so much time. /s
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This is how I got into game development myself. I used to use Javascript to make dumb little interactive games in the early 2000s before it was ever meant to do such things, emulating what is now modern day HTML5 canvas and such
bes way to learn is by doing what you're not supposed to
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On the lower end of estimates, the number of unique chess board configurations is 10^120, often referred to as the Shannon number. The universe doesn't stand a chance.
maybe a distant future technology could compute that, Clarktech style
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The solution to chess is almost certainly a draw, since this is what all top engine chess converges to. Otherwise you are completely correct: chess is unsolved and will likely never be solved.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]one AI that always manages to draw in chess is Stable diffusion and dalle...
/j
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Professor was an idiot if it gave a D for a working solution. Getting it working is the grade, optimizing is the next step.
Don’t teach lol
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bes way to learn is by doing what you're not supposed to
wrote on last edited by [email protected]True enough! Mistakes are the best teacher. That said, I'm still making games in Javascript to this day, so I guess you can say I haven't learned enough lol.
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Dwarf planets sometimes have moons (e.g. Pluto)
Some large asteroids have moons too.
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This post did not contain any content.wrote on last edited by [email protected]
This is supposed to be a joke but sadly a lot of beginner tutorials on coding Tic-Tac-Toe teach this
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This is very inefficient, they should be using a switch case.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]For efficiency you should you GOTO, so you can join trees that end up in same position.
Like those create your own adventures books.
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Did the program cheat? Tic tac toe is a tie if opponents play correctly.
I'm probably remembering it wrong, it was a long time ago. It definitely always either won or tied but could never lose, because it knew the right responses to every move. No, it didn't cheat lol.
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Placing moves in invalid locations, passing a turn, or making multiple moves on one turn?
There are no invalid locations in tic Tac toe, passing a turn provides no advantage, I suppose you could take extra turns to cheat.
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Programming chess as a single lookup table is wild
Its written vibe.
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Professor was an idiot if it gave a D for a working solution. Getting it working is the grade, optimizing is the next step.
Name checks out
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Found the guy who passed the test with
printf (" *\n **\n ***\n ****\n*****\n); -
True enough! Mistakes are the best teacher. That said, I'm still making games in Javascript to this day, so I guess you can say I haven't learned enough lol.
Considering that enough pro's are doing the same, perhaps you didn't really do it wrong?
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Name checks out
Gottem! Meanwhile, I’m right and you’re a moron.
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Gottem! Meanwhile, I’m right and you’re a moron.
The downvotes says you're retarded, give it up dickhead
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now implement castling in that
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The downvotes says you're retarded, give it up dickhead
So if your moral and intellectual superior was being upvoted, you’d concede me being right? You’re even dumber than I first assessed. Run along worthless dumbfuck, leave your superior alone.
