JamesDev

First step, get a 10×10 game board rendering, with values loaded from the input.txt.

Clearly the challenge doesn’t need any rendering, but, if I can’t see anything it makes debugging a little tricky.

To those less familiar with the CornflowerBlue background, I am using XNA / C#. Its so easy to work with, even if its probably overkill for this challenge.

Edit:
So, whats the next step… probably…
1. Load the rest of the input file, caching them as a sequence of ‘moves’ i can later do processing on. Basically, need a parser from text to my move structure.
2. Write ‘haswon’ test, to run after each turn.
3. Setup basic turn loop… make my move(s), make opponent move(s),
4. Start writing a “brute force” solver. Eg. Search through variations for a ‘won’ position.

Check this out… there is a James Ford, Inc in CA… a Ford dealership apparently!

Apparently David Bolton has been putting on programming challenges for a while but I just happend across it for the first time today. I’ve always been a fan of strategy games ( Chess, AdvancedWars, etc ). I might have to enter…

To summarize a bit:
It is a board game puzzle. The program that is able to calculate its way to a winning sequence of moves, in the fewest moves, wins; and shortest execution time is the tie-breaker. Check out the site for the full rules.

Notice that you can read ahead in the move/input files. This means, given my rough understanding of the rules, achieving victory is guarenteed, and probably in not more than 20 moves, probably a lot less actually. Also, there IS a fewest moves solution and you have all the knowledge necessary to calculate it.

So, first problem, find the fewest moves solution by brute force if necessary. Then, make it faster while you check the output against the brute-force-known-solution for accuracy.

I imagine a few papers on chess engine architecture and design would be very useful. Also, he should really post his cpu cache size

What’s a good name for a blog about game development by a programmer named James Ford…

• programmer – to long, ugly word
• game - ambigious
• ford - not about cars
• blog - not in the domain name, thats just cheesy

And that leaves… JamesDev, as in Developer not Devon, also rhymes with GamesDev, as in, http://gamedev.net

Brilliant, I know, I bet this guy is jealous.

Ford is actually a fairly common last name, and no my grandfather did not invent the automobile ( but his name was Henry ). The particular combination “James Ford” is also quite common. So to clear things up…

I don’t do actingwritingproductiondesignweb. This blog is not mine. I’m not a marketing professional in Alberta. I am not a Senior New Media Developer at  MMT Digital. I’m not a member of the The Dallas Gay Professionals Meetup Group. Actually I do live in Dallas, thats a little scary. This is not my youtube channel and this isn’t my blog at TorquePowered. Oh wait, that last one is me.

Curious, here is a list of ~319 James Ford’s that live in Texas.

So apparently godaddy is the biggest domain reseller in the world, which is how I initially bought this.

First off, godaddy’s website is a piece of shit. I can’t find my way anywhere through the ads and its just badly designed. The price for purchasing the domain seemed cheap and they did offer some sortof free hosting, I thought. I believe I clicked through about 5 pages of “do you want this upgrade” before I could get the free hosting. Turns out there is no easy way to install WordPress with their “free” hosting. I tried doing it manually but I really don’t know what I’m doing and it just wasn’t working. This was not helped by the fact that I couldn’t find any shell access to my site and the myAdmin style control panel was unintelligably crappy.

So I drew the conclusion that I would probably have to actually pay for hosting, no big deal, but guess what, I’m not buying it from you godaddy. JustHost has a much better site and turns out their control panel and pretty much everything about it feels more usable and professional.

Apparently godaddy wasn’t even the real registrar for this domain, enom was. Who is also selling jamesdev.net for about a third of the price listed at godaddy, huh? When I tried to create an account it became clear to me that enom wasn’t interested in selling me anything unless I was willing to invent a fictitious domain reseller business.

Since JustHost offered to transfer my domain for free when I purchased hosting I figured that would be a good idea if it meant I never had to visit godaddy’s site again. So, I got an email from pipe DNS requesting authorization for the transfer. Turns out they are another registrar, visited their site, and it looks fabulously simple and clean of ads, bingo!

One well designed site for managing my domain: pipe DNS

One well designed site for managing my hosting: JustHost

Maybe this will work out.

Well that was a bit of a pain, guess it’s working now, if quite generic looking.