I am working on solving snake boxing itself problem. I believe that If I use Breadth-First Search (BFS) to make a move, it can reduce the risk of being boxed greatly. My question is how many possible empty spaces (connected) I should look for to make sure that this move will not result in boxing myself.
The distance you have to look to see if you are boxed in is always going to depend on the size/position of the snake. The only way to be 100% sure is to search all moves in advance, and avoid moves that lead the snake to be boxed in. That said, you might have better luck with a depth-first search over breadth-first, because it can rapidly find a dead end (if it exists). Then avoid those moves. In your second example, depth-first would quickly find that moving "up" is a dead end.
I think the number of moves deep you need to search the game tree is related to the square area the snake can contain when it encircles itself. For example, a length 12 snake:
----
|00|
|00|
91--
If the snake goes up (north), it can still live but only if it then goes east. if it goes north again, then it dies.
The maximum area a snake can contain is: (length/4 - 1)^2. When this is fractional, you probably want to round up.
Related
I am not sure how to put this problem in a single sentence, sorry if the title is misleading.
I am currently developing a simple terrain editor with a circle-shaped brush size. The image below shows a few cases that represent my problem.
additional info: the square size is fixed and uniform and in the current version, my concern is only to find which one is hit and which one is not (the amount of region covered is important for weighting the hit, but probably not right now)
My current solution (which is not even correct for a certain condition) is: given a hit in a position (x, y) with radius r, loop through all square from (x-radius, y-radius) to (x+radius, y+radius) and apply 2-D box to circle collision detection. But I don't think this is optimal (or even correct IMO).
Can anyone help me with this one? Thank you
Since i can't add a simple comment due to bureaucracy on this website i have to type it out here.
Anyway you're in luck since i was trying to do this recently as well! The way i did it is i iterated through the vertex array and check if the current vertex falls inside the radius of the circle. But perhaps what you want is to check it against each quad center and if that center falls inside the radius then add the whole quad as it's being collided.
Of course depending on the size of your grid the performance will vary so it's good to try to iterate through as few quads as needed. Though accessing these quads from the array is something you have to figure out yourself.
With code I can get points of the person's nose, shoulders and hips. I am trying to figure out how to check if someone is facing the camera.
There are some easy ideas, but they all run into trouble when I add that the person can come closer or move further away.
Failed Attempts:
shoulder distance: turning makes it smaller, but so does walking away.
Shoulder to Hip Ratio should work, but it only makes a meaningful change after a large turn. I suppose there might be some noise in the code.
I have an intuition to compare the area of the torso (shoulders and hips) to the height of the torso? Not sure how to quantify it or if there is a better idea?
I'm picturing a typical random polygon hillside with ridges that come together into bigger ridges as you ascend and canyons that come together into bigger canyons as you descend.
The way you normally make something like this is to start with the top of the whole mountain and iterate until you have enough detail in the area you're interested in and then stop.
OK, suppose there is no absolute mountain top; it just keeps going; and I want to generate the neighboring chunk before I get to it so it matches up with what is already there.
After thinking about it for a while I think this is probably either impossible or involves a kind of math I haven't even heard of. On the other hand it -seems- like it 'should' be possible, (with extra information stored per-vertex)?
Maybe try doing it in 2D first and see what you can come up with.
It looks possible in 2D, in 3d it would work too but not with a real mountain with a top, more with an endless slope that does not converge to a point.
What you want to do is actually reversing the gravity rules in some sense.
Not sure if this is really an answer, but the question is quite vague too :)
I want to generate a cube where each face is divided into bits, like the following image:
http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/2504/gridcube165c3.jpg
Now, I can do this pretty simply if I'm just rendering quads, by just spacing vertices along each face plane at regular intervals, but my problem comes in when I want to turn the whole thing into a triangle strip. I've just got no idea how to unwrap it programmatically- is there some pattern to unwrapping that I'd follow?
I'm thinking of starting with the vertex at the top left corner as Row 0 Column 0 (R0C0), I'd want (first triangle) R0C0, ROC1, R1C1, (second triangle) R0C0, R1C0, R1C1 and so forth, and then when I reach the end of a row I guess I'd use a degenerate triangle to move to the next row, and then when I reach the end of the face I'd do the same to start a new face.
My main problem is that I can't visualize the program loop that would do this. I can reason out which vertex comes next visually, which is how I worked out the order above, but when I try to think programmatically I just stare blankly.
Even worse, with the end product I want the generated cube to be UV-mapped with a simple cube-map unwrap (the kind that looks like a T or t).
I guess, really, the best solution would be to find a library that already does this for me.
You could take a look at Ignacio Castaño's 'Optimal Grid Rendering' even though it's not triangle strips, it may inspire you.
Otherwise, you could use NVTriStrip library and be done with it.
Currently I am interning at a software company and one of my tasks has been to implement the recognition of mouse gestures. One of the senior developers helped me get started and provided code/projects that uses the $1 Unistroke Recognizer http://depts.washington.edu/aimgroup/proj/dollar/. I get, in a broad way, what the $1 Unistroke Recognizer is doing and how it works but am a bit overwhelmed with trying to understand all of the internals/finer details of it.
My problem is that I am trying to recognize the gesture of moving the mouse downards, then upwards. The $1 Unistroke Recognizer determines that the gesture I created was a downwards gesture, which is infact what it ought to do. What I really would like it to do is say "I recognize a downards gesture AND THEN an upwards gesture."
I do not know if the lack of understanding of the $1 Unistroke Recognizer completely is causing me to scratch my head, but does anyone have any ideas as to how to recognize two different gestures from moving the mouse downwards then upwards?
Here is my idea that I thought might help me but would love for someone who is an expert or even knows just a bit more than me to let me know what you think. Any help or resources that you know of would be greatly appreciated.
How My Application Currently Works:
The way that my current application works is that I capture points from where the mouse cursor is while the user holds down the left mouse button. A list of points then gets feed to a the gesture recognizer and it then spits out what it thinks to be the best shape/gesture that cooresponds to the captured points.
My Idea:
What I wanted to do is before I feed the points to the gesture recognizer is to somehow go through all the points and break them down into separate lines or curves. This way I could feed each line/curve in one at a time and from the basic movements of down, up, left, right, diagonals, and curves I could determine the final shape/gesture.
One way I thought would be good in determining if there are separate lines in my list of points is sampling groups of points and looking at their slope. If the slope of a sampled group of points differed X% from some other group of sampled points then it would be safe to assume that there is indeed a separate line present.
What I Think Are Possible Problems In My Thinking:
Where do I determine the end of a line and the start of a separate line? If I was to use the idea of checking the slope of a group of points and then determined that there was a separate line present that doesn't mean I nessecarily found the slope of a separate line. For example if you were to draw a straight edged "L" with a right angle and sample the slope of the points around the corner of the "L" you would see that the slope would give resonable indication that there is a separate line present but those points don't correspond to the start of a separate line.
How to deal with the ever changing slope of a curved line? The gesture recognizer that I use handles curves already in the way I want it too. But I don't want my method that I use to determine separate lines keep on looking for these so called separate lines in a curve because its slope is changing all the time when I sample groups of points. Would I just stop sampling points once the slope changed more than X% so many times in a row?
I'm not using the correct "type" of math for determining separate lines. Math isn't my strongest subject but I did do some research. I tried to look into Dot Products and see if that would point me in some direction, but I don't know if it will. Has anyone used Dot Prodcuts for doing something like this or some other method?
Final Thoughts, Remarks, And Thanks:
Part of my problem I feel like is that I don't know how to compeletly ask my question. I wouldn't be surprised if this problem has already been asked (in one way or another) and a solution exist that can be Googled. But my search results on Google didn't provide any solutions as I just don't know exactly how to ask my question yet. If you feel like it is confusing please let me know where and why and I will help clarify it. In doing so maybe my searches on Google will become more precise and I will be able to find a solution.
I just want to say thanks again for reading my post. I know its long but didn't really know where else to ask it. Imma talk with some other people around the office but all of my best solutions I have used throughout school have come from the StackOverflow community so I owe much thanks to you.
Edits To This Post:
(7/6 4:00 PM) Another idea I thought about was comparing all the points before a Min/Max point. For example, if I moved the mouse downards then upwards, my starting point would be the current Max point while the point where I start moving the mouse back upwards would be my min point. I could then go ahead and look to see if there are any points after the min point and if so say that there could be a new potential line. I dunno how well this will work on other shapes like stars but thats another thing Im going to look into. Has anyone done something similar to this before?
If your problem can be narrowed down to breaking apart a general curve into straight or smoothly curved partial lines then you could try this.
Comparing the slope of the segments and identifying breaking points where it is greater then some threshold would work in a very simplified case. Imagine a perfectly formed L-shape where you have a right angle between two straight lines. Obviously the corner point would be the only one where the slope difference is above the threshold as long as the threshold is between 0 and 90 degrees, and thus a identifiable breaking point.
However, the vertical and horizontal lines may be slightly curved so the threshold would need to be large enough for these small differences in slope to be ignored as breaking points. You'd also have to decide how sharp a corner the algorithm should pick up as a break. is 90 deg or higher required, or is even 30 deg enough? This is an important question.
Finally, to make this robust I would not be satisfied comparing the slopes of two adjacent segments. Hands may shake, corners may be smoothed out and the ideal conditions to find straight lines and sharp corners will probably never occur. For each point investigated for a break I would take the average slope of the N previous segments and compare it to the average slope of the N following segments. This can be efficiently implemented using a running mean. By choosing a good sample number N (depending on the accuracy of the input, the total number of points, etc) the algorithm can avoid the noise and make better detections.
Basically the algorithm would be:
For each investigated point (beginning N points into the sequence and ending N points before the end.)
Compute average slope of the N previous segments.
Compute average slope of the N next segments.
If the difference of the averages is greater than the Threshold, mark current point as a breaking point.
This is quite off the top of my head. You'd have to try it in your application.
if you work with absolute angles, like upwards and downwards, you can simply take the absolute slope between two points (not necessarily adjacent) to determine if it's RIGHT, LEFT, UP, DOWN (if that is enough of a distinction)
the art is to find a distance between points so that the angle is not random (with 1px, the angle will be a multiple of 45°)
There is a firefox plugin for Navigation using mouse gestures that works very well. I think it's FireGestures, but I'm not sure. I guess you can get some inspiration from that one
Additional thought: If you draw a shape by connectiong successive points, then connecting back to the first point, the ratio between the area and the final line segment's length is also an indicator for the gesture's "edginess"
If you are just interested in up/down/left/right, a first approximation is to check 45 degree segments of a circle. This is easily done by checking the the horizontal difference between (successive) points against the vertical difference between points.
Say you have a greater positive horizontal difference than vertical difference, then that would be 'RIGHT'.
The only difficulty then comes for example, in distinguishing UP/DOWN from UP/RIGHT/DOWN. But this could be done by distances between points. If you determine that the mouse has moved RIGHT for less than 20 pixels say, then you can ignore that movement.