[appleeaters]Player coordinate problems

I run through possible scenarios to determine the best course of action at times ...



The problem with this is that the actual player coordinates are altered. That shouldn't happen, should it?

I tracked it down to a line like

I modified my robotslib.php to generate a new $game array with each call, so no matter what you do to it, the array won't be modified by the robot. I posted it on my PHP contest page (only up for the length of the contest) at http://rumkin.com/reference/php_contest/ in case someone else has this problem.

Is this the best solution, or are there alternatives out there?

Tyler, I spent three hours on Monday trying to figure that out.

This line:

*Should* make a deep copy of every element in $game. But as you (and I) discovered, it doesn't, if an element in $game is a reference, then the corresponding element in $testGame points to the same value (not a copy). So then changing that value in $testGame will also change it in $game.

This is a bug in PHP:
http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=20993

The only workaround I've found to force a deep copy is:

Which is sloww :-(

Another workaround would be to change the players location, determine the score for that lcoation, and then move it back. Hmm.. that might be better than serilaize();

I would like if line 70 in robotslib.php would be changed to:

(ie, no & symbol)

That would speed up my algorithm. But if that can't be guranteed, then I think I'm going to have to abandon my recursive-score technique for something simpler and quicker.

I hope that helps.

Chris B (chris@mretc.net)

You can use ...



and then you could just use the 'player_test' index instead of 'player'. Or, you could pass the new X and Y of the player to your test function. Or, you could use my modified robotslib.php -- still faster than even the newest version posted today! :-) http://rumkin.com/reference/php_contest/

Is fidian's improvement likely to be in the final library? I have a similar approach and it's a pain that the new library doesn't like it. I've been using fidian's but would obviously like to know if I can do that in the real thing!

thanks