We had 9 people at Tuesday's tech meeting at MIT. I showed off a program I've written to solve Ricochet Robot puzzles. (http://www.ricochetrobot.com/index.html?p=instructions) It does a breadth-first search of all possible moves looking for the shortest solution. It works, but is pretty slow. I got some good feedback about how to improve it, such as storing the board layout as a bit string rather than a hash.
Aaron described a similar but more interesting Ricochet Robot problem: of all possible starting configurations, find the longest optimal solution. The program he and some friends wrote took only an hour two to run through all the boards and find the answer, which was 23 moves (as far as he recalled). We briefly discussed the planning for YAPC. Kenneth is putting together the proposal, which will cover our three potential venues; UMass, Simmons, and MIT. I asked people to brainstorm topics they'd like to hear about at a future tech meeting. You can view (and update) the list here: http://boston.pm.org/kwiki/index.cgi?TechMeetingTopics Next month's meeting will be on Tuesday, November 8, at MIT, E51-376. I will be presenting John Norton's Spiro JAPH. I am looking for an additional presentation; please let me know if you'd like to give a talk. Ronald _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
