Hi
The following code is for a ‘tour’ of a knight piece around a chess board. The knight’s moves are randomly generated from an array of acceptable knights’ moves.
The moves are generated and continued for each game until a move is no longer available.
The number of moves taken by the knight are put into an array and printed out.
The #define games at the top determines the number of games run. (Here finite and set at 15)
I would like to turn my gameNum[i] array into a variable length array, the length of which will only be determined at compile time.
I believe this is called a variable length array and is now allowed in C.
Right now, the length of the array is determined by #define GAME 15.
Here, I would like to change it to a brute force attempt so that my game will continue to run until all 64 moves are obtained.
So, I would like to insert a while statement.
However, I am not sure how to create a variable length array to accept the game result data?
Any thoughts?
Happy to provide further explanation of the code.
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <time.h>
#define ROW 8
#define GAME 15
#define COLUMN 8
//GLOBAL
// functions
void printBoard(void);
void sortArray(void);
void printArray(void);
void game(void);
// board & move combination arrays
int board[ROW][COLUMN] = {0};
int vertical[ROW] = {-1,-2,-2,-1,1,2,2,1};
int horizontal[COLUMN] = {2,1,-1,-2,-2,-1,1,2};
int gameNum[GAME] = {0};
//co-ordinates variables
int y =3; // row
int x =3; // column
int move = 0; // the move we will make (here using vertical /horizontal array above to make legal moves)
int numMove = 1; // number of moves legally performed this game
//MAIN
int main(void)
{
//seed the randomizer
srand(time(NULL));
//let's play a game = here we will play 'GAME' number of times
size_t i = 0;
for (i = 0; i < GAME; ++i) {
//for each game, put co-ordinates back in the middle of board and reset all moves to zero
y,x = 3;
for (size_t j = 0; j < ROW; ++j) {
for (size_t k = 0; k < COLUMN; ++k) {
board[j][k] = 0;
}
}
numMove = 1; // starting in the middle
board[y][x] = numMove; // put the 1 in the middle
// begin game
game();
//put the game results (numberf of legal piece moves into an array)
gameNum[i] = numMove;
}
//sort the array top down
sortArray();
//print final game results
printArray();
} // end main
void game (void) {
//1. generate new random move value
numMove = 1;
size_t i = 0;
//2. try to complete 64 moves across the board
while (i < 64) {
//3. generate new random move value
move = 1 + rand()%7;
//2. generate new y,x co-ordinates for move
y += vertical[move];
x += horizontal[move];
i++;
//3. test
if ((y < 0 || y > 7 || x < 0 || x > 7) || (board[y][x] != 0 )) {
//4. if it doesn't work, put back to where you were before and tray again
y-=vertical[move];
x-=horizontal[move];
continue;
}
//5. increment move number
numMove++;
board[y][x] = numMove;
} // end while
}
void printBoard(void) {
for (size_t i = 0; i < ROW; ++i) {
for (size_t j = 0; j < COLUMN; ++j) {
printf(" %d ", board[i][j]);
}
puts("");
}
}
void printArray(void) {
for (size_t k = 0; k < GAME; ++k) {
printf("%d %d \n", k, gameNum[k]);
}
}
void sortArray(void) {
for (size_t pass = 0; pass < GAME; ++pass) {
for (size_t pass1 = 0; pass1 < GAME; ++pass1) {
if (gameNum[pass1+1] > gameNum[pass1]) {
int a = gameNum[pass1];
gameNum[pass1] = gameNum[pass1 + 1];
gameNum[pass1 + 1] = a;
}
}
}
}
