[racket] Using Racket to solve Professor Layton puzzles

On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 7:02 PM, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
> Yesterday, Jay McCarthy wrote:
>> My blog now has what I believe is a solution. At least, the test
>> case you provide passes and the next few elements make sense.
>
> That looks right, though pretty verbose...  (And BTW, you're missing
> some way to mark the code as such -- there's no indentation!)

Oi, I posted it wrong... I just fixed it.

> Here's my code:
>
>  #lang lazy
>  (define (counts l num count)
>    (cond [(= count 0) (counts (cdr l) (car l) 1)]
>          [(= (car l) num) (counts (cdr l) num (add1 count))]
>          [else (list* count num (counts l 0 0))]))
>  (define foo (list* 1 1 2 1 (counts (cddr foo) 0 0)))
>
> The interesting bit here is that I need to start it with 4 numbers.
> (And an amusing fact: once I told Matthias what the problem was, it
> took him about two seconds to see that problem coming up.)
>
> I think that you're "cheating" around this problem here:
>
>     (if (empty? elements)
>       (loop #f 0 (list count last))
>       ...)
>
> Another thing that looks like it could be unkosher is that instead of
> feeding the sequence to itself you're building a description then go
> in a loop with the new description.  It looks like that could break if
> a description chunk begins with the same element the list it's
> describing ends with.

It actually never adds the final number to the description for exactly
this reason... it feeds it back in to the next round of the describe
function to get added on.

Jay

>
> In any case, what was nice about this is that when I first wrote the
> code and used `1 1' to bootstrap it, it failed with a reentrant
> promise.  I immediately thought that there was a bug in the code
> before I realized that it works exactly as it should.  The lazy
> stepper should help clarify that!
>
> (But apparently Stephen is taking one of these mysterious "vakeyshon"
> things that seem to be getting popular recently.  I don't know how one
> looks but they sound very dangerous.)
>
> --
>          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
>                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!
>



-- 
Jay McCarthy <jay at cs.byu.edu>
Assistant Professor / Brigham Young University
http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~jay

"The glory of God is Intelligence" - D&C 93