Clojurians Log v2

soooo I did a thing, finally got it working last night https://github.com/nate/labyrinth

http://monosnap.sutton.me/20190701113612-1._bash.png

my first serious-ish clojure project

it needs tests, badly

Neat, you could try a generative test checking that you can get from one point in the maze to any other point

oh a solver is definitely on my list

I want to name it minotaur (not theseus because no one remembers him)

I'll give look over the code after work for you

oh that would be awesome, thanks!

please be merciless, I really want to improve

I probably should add docs or at least reasoning for why things are put together how they are

there's always more to do, I suppose

A simple test would be checking that all squares have at least one "open" side

hmmm

if one open side faced the open side of another cell, that would pass that test

solving the maze seems incredibly amenable to parallelism

start with a threadpool working off a queue, in the main thread add the different directions off the entrance to the queue. each thread walks the direction until it reaches another decision point where it enqueues the two+ directions that are possible, repeat

and then be listening on a channel for when the exit is found

sort of flooding the maze by using threads, letting each thread handle flooding of one direction

if it's not a perfect maze then you could let the threads continue to flood the maze and then compare the paths to get the shortest one

terminating the threads might be tricky

but I guess if you have a quit channel and a queue channel and the thread pool listens on each with alts, preferring the quit channel, then we can just close the quit channel to force all the threads to exit

or go blocks or what have you

From playing around with go blocks and multi threaded tasks in the past my advice is to get a serial process working first. Concurrency even in Clojure gets tricky and hard to debug very fast 🙂

for sure

I rewrote this library at one point, made it work 98% better: https://github.com/igrigorik/agent

but eventually I just ripped it out of my projects and used forking so everything could be done serially yet in parallel

also because ruby

always because ruby