hacker.org

How long does the solution take to find on your implementations? I'm using Perl and LWP and I've been running for a while here.. Serious buyers remorse. That and I've thought of two decent optimisations in the meantime.

- Edit: Solved -

Just a tip.. be very careful how you check your navigation.. let's just say checking for "boom" as a turnaround point might make you miss "boom! the answer is: xxxxxxxxxxx" (this is just an example, it doesn't look like this!)

Hmm. I *think* I have mapped out the entire maze, but I did not find an exit. So probably I have made a mistake somewhere. Could somebody please have a look at my map layout (I could send it to you as per private message) and give me a hint on what went wrong?

EDIT: Solved it now.

If you take the shortest path, how many steps do you have to take? (You can add +5 or +5% if you don't want to spoil something.) I just want to know if I have to wait the whole night or if my programm will come to an and soon. At the moment I got: "DRRDDDDDDRRRRRRUURRDDDDLLDDDDDDDDDDR" ... seems to get big.

Answer to myself: Between 100 and 150 steps for my path.

I think there is only one correct way (the challenge description says you cannot cross your own path) and yes, it is between 100 and 150 steps. I cannot say further

I request either a offline Version of the maze or a faster server. The 2 second response time the server has at the moment makes solving this a trial of patience...

EDIT:
Just after I posted this came:

503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

My script has been running for 1 1/2 hours and now all is lost...

While it is true that the server's response time sucks, a 503 error definitely does not mean that you need to completely restart your script. I have had several of those when doing the 'Cavern Master' challenge, it simply means that you need to detect for errors and in such a case, you need to reload the page (= send the last request again).

AMindForeverVoyaging wrote:While it is true that the server's response time sucks, a 503 error definitely does not mean that you need to completely restart your script. I have had several of those when doing the 'Cavern Master' challenge, it simply means that you need to detect for errors and in such a case, you need to reload the page (= send the last request again).

Unlike the cavern challenges this one does not save its state... Meaning I would have to save it within my script but the algorithm(recursive backtracking) I use makes this a bit hard...

I don't think it's hard. You have an M*N array in memory, which you can write to disk. Then again, I actually did not solve it with an algorithm but made a little graphical 'game' out of it and solved the maze by hand.

AMindForeverVoyaging wrote:I don't think it's hard. You have an M*N array in memory, which you can write to disk.

No I don't have an array. In my eyes using an array here is a working but ugly solution.

EDIT:

Anyway I just solved it on the 3rd or 4th run...

Hi All,

Can anyone confirm if this challenge is working fine as of now or not?
The reason for asking is I am not seeing anything on the PHP page no matter whatever steps I give in the URL. Neither I am seeing anything from the HTTP response.

Thanks a ton.

It seems that this challenge is broken. I get a blank page too when trying to access it.

Thanks for confirming it AMindForeverVoyaging. Looks like Adum needs to be informed about this too.

Piyushgrwl wrote:Thanks for confirming it AMindForeverVoyaging. Looks like Adum needs to be informed about this too.

Please send a mail to him about this:
adum at adum dot com

Challenge still broken I wonder if adum has anyone helping him with the site

Niker wrote:Challenge still broken I wonder if adum has anyone helping him with the site

Well, it seems that he does not give anybody access to this site. Then there will of course be nobody there to help with running and updating it. I did ask if I could help, but to no avail.