Purpose of this assignment

• To encourage you to explore some of the features of Scala

General idea of the assignment

Solve a "jigsaw puzzle."

Details

Each piece in a typical jigsaw puzzle has four edges (left, right, top, bottom) and can fit with other pieces in only one way. Since it's hard to represent curved edges in a program, we will use random numbers to represent edge shapes. Two edges will fit together if they have the same number. Hence, our completed jigsaw puzzle will look something like this:

All outside edges will be zero.

All non-edges will have a random positive integer between 1 and Int.MaxValue, inclusive. The four edges of a piece will be given in clockwise order, starting from any side; thus, a piece may be in any of four orientations. If two pieces have edges with the same nonzero number, you are guaranteed that those two pieces belong together; no other edges in the puzzle will have this number.

Pieces are immutable; when solving the puzzle, the orientation of pieces is irrelevant. If, for example, two pieces each have a side 166, then those pieces may be placed adjacent to each other, either side-by-side or one above the other. For example, pink piece in the above example, although rotated 90°, is placed correctly. However, when the completed puzzle is printed, the pieces should be printed so that matching sides are adjacent. The above puzzle should be printed as follows:

    +---------+---------+---------+---------+
    |   000   |   000   |   000   |   000   |
    |000   143|143   777|777   298|298   000|
    |   171   |   091   |   451   |   380   |
    +---------+---------+---------+---------+
    |   171   |   091   |   451   |   380   |
    |000   212|212   317|317   304|304   000|
    |   188   |   167   |   155   |   441   |
    +---------+---------+---------+---------+
    |   188   |   167   |   155   |   441   |
    |000   667|667   850|850   240|240   000|
    |   000   |   000   |   000   |   000   |
    +---------+---------+---------+---------+

Specific requirements

We need to be able to run our unit tests on your program. That means we need to specify a bare minimum of classes and methods. You should have:

• A class PuzzlePiece(val sides: List[Int]). The sides will be listed in clockwise order, starting with any side. Thus they may be in any of four (not eight!) orientations.
• A class JigsawPuzzle(firstPiece: PuzzlePiece, pieces: Set[PuzzlePiece]). The firstPiece (which is also included in pieces) will go in location (0)(0) of the array;
  
  • A method (in JigsawPuzzle) def solve: Array[Array[PuzzlePiece]].
  • Note: Syntax for creating such an array is val ary = Array.ofDim[PuzzlePiece](nRows, nColumns)
  • A method (in JigsawPuzzle) def printSolution(solution: Array[Array[PuzzlePiece]]): Unit.

To allow us to test your program, the input parameters and output results must have the types shown. This is not intended to constrain your implementation to work with these types internally.

General idea of the assignment

Clarity and conciseness are highly correlated. In other words, short programs are usually (but not always) easier to understand than long programs. Your goal should almost always be to write the clearest, most easily understandable program that you can.

This time is different.

This time the goal is to write the shortest program you can to solve the given problem, even at the expense of clarity.

• The length of the program will be the number of tokens in it. Example of tokens are: variable names, function names, keywords (such as while), integers, floating point numbers, single punctuation marks (such as a bracket, [), multiple-character operators (such as +=).
• A string counts as one token, regardless of length.
• An operator counts as one token, regardless of the number of characters in it.
• Comments are not counted. Please comment your program properly!
• Unit tests are not counted. Unit test all non-I/O methods.

When attempting this, I strongly recommend:

• Use Test-Driven Development.
• Make it correct before you make it shorter.
• Make it clear before you make it shorter.

This assignment is a competition

The winner will score 150 points; runners-up may score as much as 120 points. Correct, on-time programs longer than 3.25 times the length of the shortest program will receive 75 points.

Pay attention to the grading scheme, because it's unusual.

Grading

Among the completely correct programs turned in by the due date,

• Let min_length be the length (as defined above) of the shortest completely correct program turned in by the due date
• Let your_length be the length of your programThen your_score = max(75, 140 - 20 * (your_length / min_length)).

For example, if the shortest program is 1000 tokens long, and your program is 1200 tokens long, then your score would be
     max(75, 140 - 20 * (1200/1000)) = max(75, 140 - 20 * 1.2) = 116
and if your program is 3000 tokens long, then your score would be
     max(75, 140 - 20 * (3000/1000)) = max(75, 140 - 20 * 3) = 80

Finally, the winner of the competition (shortest correct on-time program) will receive a bonus of 30 points. In the event of a tie, points will be distributed evenly.

Thus, grades for correct, on-time programs may range from 75 to 120 points. A completely correct program, with no deductions for style or lateness, will be worth 75 points, regardless of length.

Programs that are late or not completely correct will be graded on the basis of 75 points (not 100), with the usual kinds of deductions for failed tests and lateness.

I am providing a project Tokenizer.zip that you can use to count tokens in your program. This program has two known bugs, neither of which should affect the token counts in this assignment:

• Quoted strings containing \" quote characters are not counted correctly.
• Periods and commas are counted as identifiers, not as delimiters.

Note: You are not allowed to use scala.tools.nsc (a Scala interpreter) or anything similar.

Due date