riswords / icfp2015

ICFP 2015 Programming Contest

This is our submission to the ICFP 2015 Programming Contest.

Aside

We realize that this is not the way that inputs were deemed to be accepted by the judges. We toyed briefly with the idea of using nodejs to take these arguments, but that never happened. To be honest, even our current implementation is not particularly fast (you'll see what we mean), and we decided that going for performance points was out of the question early on. As such, we hope that you enjoy our work for what it is: a showcase of some of the features and promise of the Elm language.

Running The Application

To run the application, you have two options:

1. elm-make - You can use the elm compiler to build a website that you can then view. To do this, try something like elm-make elm_main.elm --output index.html
2. elm-reactor - If you start the elm reactor in this directory, then you can just point your browser at elm_main.elm.

During running, you may notice what appear to be lock-ups. The program will eventually resume; we are still troubleshooting the cause of this behavior.

Adding New Tests (and other Stuff)

The test cases provided during the contest are all contained in Tests.elm. They're each a Json string bound to a variable. To add more test cases, edit this file and add additional definitions of the form:

testN = """"
  <string in full>
 """"

You'll also want to add the test to the drop-down so that you can run it. To do that, you'll need to edit Viewer.elm. There's a big list of test tuples right at the top, and you add your test cases there. Don't worry; all of the tests are loaded into Viewer.elm, so you won't have to modify the imports or anything else.

It's that easy! ;)

Output

The output is all conveniently printed on the left of the screen!

Files

Here are all of the elm files in our submission.

• DataStructs.elm - all of the data structures for the program
• Engine.elm - code for interacting with the game state
• Hex.elm - code for dealing with hexes and grid cells
• Init.elm - initialization code
• IO.elm - Json IO tools
• ListDict.elm - dictionary implementation that doesn't require comparable
• PowerWords.elm - power word finder algorithm
• Rand.elm - random number generator
• Search.elm - search algorithm
• Tests.elm - tests from the contest website
• Update.elm - game model updater code
• Util.elm - utility code and small functions for general use
• Viewer.elm - the code for rendering the model to the screen