Comments on: Escape from Zurg

By: Sam Halliday

Sam Halliday — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 21:27:55 +0000

I've written up a Java implementation on the javablog. I tried to be as general as possible. Naturally it does work out to be somewhat more verbose than the Ruby or Haskell versions. I actually really like Haskell, although I've not quite got the hang of Monads yet.

By: Javablog » Escape from Zurg

Javablog » Escape from Zurg — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 21:24:10 +0000

[...] Butcher from the Texperts recently wrote a great blog post with a Ruby implementation of Escape from Zurg. I had been meaning to learn both Ruby and Haskell for a long time and recently [...]

By: Noah Gibbs

Noah Gibbs — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 22:23:57 +0000

Ah! Sorry, I missed that bit. Makes sense.

By: Paul Butcher

Paul Butcher — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 16:38:03 +0000

Hey Noah, The code is correct - you need to define Symbol#to_proc. The source code (and explaination of how it works) is available here. Or you can download the source of my solution (which includes the Symbol#to_proc trick) here.

By: Noah Gibbs

Noah Gibbs — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 16:30:12 +0000

Hello! I’ve typed this and I’m getting a compile error when defining the “Move” struct, specifically on the line “who.collect(&:time).max”. It *does* look incorrect. If I change it to “who.collect{ |toy| toy.time }.max”, it works fine.

If it helps, I’m using Cygwin ruby 1.8.6. Maybe the syntax above is for some more recent version?

For those, like me, who are looking at this and can’t seem to figure it out by inspection, the correct series of moves is:

Woody and Buzz go right
Buzz goes left
Rex and Hamm go right
Woody goes left
Woody and Buzz go right

By: Paul Butcher

Paul Butcher — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 10:24:49 +0000

Do let us know how you get on if you do, Sam. I did think about trying to come up with a Java (or C++) solution and decided that I didn’t want to do that kind of violence to my brain

Frankly, I’d be amazed if you can come up with anything even close to the succinctness and clarity of the Haskell or Ruby solutions in Java. But I’d love to be proven wrong!

By: Sam Halliday

Sam Halliday — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 09:54:45 +0000

I recently bought “Rails for Java Developers” and “Haskell: The Craft of Functional Programming” for my holiday bookshelf. I’ve been in the Java monoculture for too long!

However, I’ve yet to see a more elegant solution in Ruby than in Java… might have a bash at doing this in Java to see if Ruby has some tricks that I missed.

By: lojic.com » Blog Archive » Escape from Zurg

lojic.com » Blog Archive » Escape from Zurg — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 20:39:02 +0000

[...] author blogged about it here – nice solution. He refers to the original paper that got things started, but I haven’t had [...]