My professor gave us a project: make a minesweeper clone. However, he said that he will give bonus points for the 3 fastest algorithms for board generation. I'm currently doing the algorithm that places the numbers. How should I do it? I thought of doing something like
For every mine, increment the value of adjacent cells
or
For all cells, count the number of adjacent mines
Which is faster? Or could you recommend a faster method? Thanks
I think the fastest method will be by not generating the numbers at board generation (I know it's almost cheating). It's most likely fastest to only generate the number when the player clicks on a square rather then during board generation.
Secondly consider how you are going to generate mines, is each place on the board going to pass a check (loop over every square)? Or are you just going to generate random positions for each mine? How do you deal with someone entering that every single tile should be a mine? That's going to slow you down with the second type but the first one can be needlessly slow as well.
Mine creation
int x = random.next(min, max);
int y = random.next(min, max);
mineList.add(new XYClass(x,y))
Number calculation
Foreach(XYClass xy : mineList)
addPlusOneToAdjacentCells(xy);
This way, you don't even have to loop through all the cells, just those that are important.
