This project implements a maze solver.
Name: Evan Kenyon
Start Date: 9/8/21
Finish Date: 9/13/21
Hours Spent: 8
No tutorials or other resources used.
The only resource I used for this project was the lab_maze course gitlab repo. Specifically, I started refactoring the code with a partner, Amr Tagel-Din, in lab, and afterwards continued to do so (specifically, I brought up member variables and methods to SearchAlgorithm in lab and afterwards, and created QueueSearchAlgorithm afterwards).
Main class: Main
Data files needed: none
Key/Mouse inputs:
- N is to create a new maze
- S is to step through the maze solver (must pause first)
- P is to pause the maze solver
- D is to start a DFS maze solver
- B is to start a BFS maze solver
- G is to start a Greedy maze solver
- R is to start a RandomWalk maze solver
- M is to start a Magic maze solver
Known Bugs: None
I found the requirement to create a public method that returns the current number of backtracks that have had to be made a bit ambiguous. It was difficult to tell what counted as a backtrack in Greedy and BFS, so I made the assumption that whenever next was not null after next had been not null (there was a member variable that was set to false whenever next was not null and then set to true the next time next was null) that that counted as a backtrack (since this was the case for the other search algorithms).
Overall, I thought this assignment was very helpful. I did not have to put as much time into it compared to the other projects thusfar to still learn a lot about a key concept. The only thing that I think could've been better was the ambiguity with number of backtracks for BFS and Greedy as mentioned above. However, I still think that this was somewhat positive since it forced me to make an assumption based on the information I had, which usually I have not had to do while coding.
