Code Golf: Connect 4
- by Matthieu M.
If you don't know the Connect 4 game, follow the link :)
I used to play it a lot when I was a child. At least until my little sister got bored with me winning...
Anyway I was reading the Code Golf: Tic Tac Toe the other day and I thought that solving the Tic Tac Toe problem was simpler than solving the Connect 4... and wondered how much this would reflect on the number of characters a solution would yield.
I thus propose a similar challenge: Find the winner
The grid is given under the form of a string meant to passed as a parameter to a function.
The goal of the code golf is to write the body of the function, the parameter will be b, of string type
The image in the wikipedia article leads to the following representation: "....... ..RY... ..YYYR. ..RRYY. ..RYRY. .YRRRYR" (6 rows of 7 elements) but is obviously incomplete (Yellow has not won yet)
There is a winner in the grid passed, no need to do error checking
Remember that it might not be exactly 4
The expected output is the letter representing the winner (either R or Y)
I expect perl mongers to produce the most unreadable script (along with Ook and whitespace, of course), but I am most interested in reading innovative solutions. I must admit the magic square solution for Tic Tac Toe was my personal fav and I wonder if there is a way to build a similar one with this.
Well, happy Easter weekend :) Now I just have a few days to come up with a solution of my own!
