Robots

This repo contains a solver for the Ricochet Robots game.

It is the basis for my talk at Mountain West Ruby Conference 2015.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'robots'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install robots

Usage

The robots executable will solve Ricochet Robots using the command-line options provided. Currently, only a single fixed board layout has been implemented.

There are three modes:

• -g/--goal COLOR,SHAPE: Solve for a single goal target.

• -p/--play: Play a simulated game of Ricochet Robots. All 17 goal targets are solved in a random order. Each goal will be solved starting from the ending positions after solving the previous goal.

• -a/--all: Solve all 17 goal targets in a random order, always starting from the same starting state. Before each goal, all of the robots will be moved back to their initial positions.

Unless otherwise specified, all five robots will be placed at random starting positions on a randomly-configured board. This can be changed with the following options:

• -c/--count COUNT: Use COUNT robots instead of the default five. The program does not support more than five robots.

• -r/--robot COLOR,ROW,COLUMN: Place the COLOR robot at position (ROW, COLUMN). Positions are 0-based starting from the upper right corner of the board. This option can be used up to five times, for five robots. If fewer -r options are specified than COUNT above, the remaining robots will be randomly placed on the board.

• -t/--tiles T1,T2,T3,T4: Use the specified tiles to populate the board. Allowable tile specifiers are A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2, D1, and D2. The tiles are positioned in the upper-left, upper-right, lower-right, and lower-left quadrants in order. Only one tile from each group (A, B, C, D) may be used at a time.

There are a couple of other options that are more useful for testing:

• --algorithm ALGORITHM: Specify the solving algorithm to be used. The default is the current best algorithm, goal_first, but you can also specify bfs to run the standard breadth-first solver.

• --s/--seed SEED: Use the specified value as the seed for the random-number generator. This is most useful for repeating a previous game, which allows somewhat repeatable performance testing.

• --v/--verbose: Prints additional information about in-progress solutions while solving boards.

Examples

Play a Simulated Game

bundle exec robots -p -c 5

Re-play a Previous Game

When running robots, it prints out a seed value. If you re-run the game with the same options and provide the seed, it will re-play the exact same game.

bundle exec robots -p -c 5 --seed 4347

License

Authored by Randy Coulman and the Engineering Team of Coding ZEAL

Copyright (c) 2017 Zeal, LLC. Licensed under the MIT license.

Contributing

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/CodingZeal/robots/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request