It’s Friday, and time again for the Friday Fragment: our weekly programming-related puzzle.
This Week’s Fragment
Having finished a series of game bots, we’ll have a Thanksgiving change of pace and do another cryptogram. Crack the following cipher:
OBKR
UOXOGHULBSOLIFBBWFLRVQQPRNGKSSO
TWTQSJQSSEKZZWATJKLUDIAWINFBNYP
VTTMZFPKWGDKZXTJCDIGKUHUAUEKCAR
You can provide the solution or just offer suggestions on how to go about solving it. For example, I can’t solve it, but based on its background (try some googling), I have ideas about how it might be solved. To “play along,” post your response as a comment or send it via email.
Last Week’s Fragment – Solution
Last week’s puzzle was to code a simple Reversi competition:
Write code to call competing Reversi bots, flip pieces, and score the results.
Here’s a solution in PHP.
<?php
require('reversimove.php);
$urls[0] = 'http://derekwilliams.us/bots/reversi';
$urls[1] = $urls[0]; // Your bot here
$pieces = array('X', 'O');
$board = str_repeat('.',64);
$board[27]='O'; $board[28]='X';
$board[35]='X'; $board[36]='O';
$player = 0;
for ($i=0; $i<64; $i++) {;
$play = file_get_contents($urls[$player].'?board='.$board.'&piece='.$pieces[$player]);
$board = update_board($board, $play);
show_board($board);
$player = $player == 0 ? 1 : 0;
}
function show_board($board) {
$scores = array('.' => 0, 'X' => 0, 'O' => 0);
echo '<table border="1">';
for ($i=0; $i<8; $i++) {
echo '<tr border="1">';
for ($j=0; $j<8; $j++) {
$piece = $board[($i*8)+$j];
$scores[$piece]++;
echo '<td border="1">'.$piece.' </td>';
}
echo '</tr>';
}
echo '</table><p> </p>';
printf("<p>X: %d, O: %d</p>", $scores['X'], $scores['O']);
if ($scores['.'] == 0)
exit(printf("<p>%s wins!</p>", $scores['X'] > $scores['O'] ? 'X' : 0));
}
?>
You can run this solution and other bots from the links at http://derekwilliams.us/bots. This page also includes full source code, including helper functions.
