Use Computers to Study the Solutions of the Game "Rings of the Magi"

Author: Hsin-Chuan Lai(Department of Information and Computer Education,National Taiwan Normal University),Shun-Shii Lin(Graduate Institute of Computer Science and Information Engineering,National Taiwan Normal University)

Vol.&No.：Vol. 47, No. 1
Date：April 2002
Pages：41-66
DOI：10.6301/JNTNU.2002.47(1).03

Abstract：

In this paper, we will use computers to design data structures as well as algorithms to derive the solutions for the game "Rings of the Magi". Since many initial configurations of this game need lots of steps to reach the final configurations, its game tree grows very rapidly. We could not search the entire game tree with the "brute force" approach. Previously, there are no computer solutions for this hard problem, but there are many manual trials that are found in many software documents. In this paper, we will explore some useful techniques for solving this game. The results show that we can get available solutions for most boards in a reasonable amount of time. We hope that this paper can introduce the interest of subsequent researchers.

Keywords：brute force approach, game tree, hash table

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