Graphical Representation of a Puzzle Solver

Try the game Here

The game

The program can solve the clasic Sliding puzzle.

Board

The consept is very simple. The user can select the boardsize which will be the edge of the board. On the board we have tiles numbered from 1 to edge squered-1.With those tiles the board is coverded fully except a single spot.

Rules

There is 1 very simple rule.The player can transfer to the missing spot any tile adjacent to it.

Goal

The player must move the tiles to order them in decending order (1 int the top left corner) leaving the blank spot last on the bottom right corner

The solver

The program uses the IDA* search algorithm to navigate from the given state of the game to the goal. In 5 simple steps:

• Evaluate current state and set its evaluation as the worst.
• Find a child state with better evaluation than the parent state.
• If found then procced with that branch of the tree.
• Else change the worst with the best of the children evaluations.
• Start from the current state again with the new worst evaluation.

The graphical enviroment

For the graphics the program uses a library called Raylib. The program can adapt to any board size since it creates all the not-repeating sprites in real time.

Installation and Running

• Install the program by compiling the source code
  1. Download the source files and navigate to the downloaded folder.
  2. Make sure make is instaled.
  3. Type make in the downloaded folder.

Thanks to Mitsos the program can now be compiled for windows and linux through wsl. All you have to do to compile for windows is add PLATFORM=win to the make command.

Compilation for windows for WSL may require the gcc mingw package. For Ubuntu you can downloadit using apt by typing: sudo apt-get install gcc-mingw-w64

• Run the program
  1. Type ./game.

User Interface

Menu screen

On the menu screen you will be asked to choose the following:

• Size or in other words the edge of the square puzzle.
• The Current puzzle that the game will start on.
• Solving Mode that can be either auto or manual.

The puzzle must be entered using a spesific format. That is seperating every tile with a space. Example for a puzzle of size 4: 6 4 11 0 7 1 3 2 13 5 9 8 10 14 15 12

On the same window you will find some buttons to help you:

• A Copy button that will copy the current puzzle text-box to your clipboard.(Ctrl+C)
• A Paste button that will paste your clipboard to the current puzzle textbox.(Ctrl+V)
• The Start button to start the puzzle (or use the enter key).
• Exit button that will close the game
• Shuffle button that will create a random puzzle for you to solve.

For the suffle to work you first need to set the size of the puzzle.

Auto Mode

When in auto mode:

• Press [A] to toggle between automatic procceding or manual.
• Press [ENTER] to Start/Procced the solution.
• Hit the Back to go back to the main menu and carry the current state of the puzzle with you.

Manual Mode

When in manual mode:

• Use the Arrow Keys to solve the puzzle.
• Hit the Back to go back to the main menu and carry the current state of the puzzle with you.

When the puzzle is solved the only thing you can do in both modes is press the back button

Known bugs

• Some times the algorithm will mark a solvable puzzle as unsolvable.