15 - Sticky

I represent an implementation of the Fifteen Puzzle game based on two examples from the slint and pathfinding crates.

How to play

You can select the automatic mode of finding a solution - the Win button. It is better to run it in the release profile, because in dev the algorithm for finding the shortest path A* works much slower (approximately 10 times).

cargo run --release

Finding a solution with the least number of moves is a combinatorial problem with a huge number of possible variants. It may require a large amount of RAM and time. Although usually the game is solved in a short time (a few seconds).

But there are also difficult cases:

For example, such placement:

 9, 14,  5, 13,  
 3,   , 11,  6,  
 4,  1, 10, 15,  
 2,  8,  7, 12

Solvable in 109.324s, and requires 16.125 GiB of memory.
And this:

11,  3,  1, 13, 
15,  5,  9,  8, 
12,  7, 10,   ,  
6,  4, 14,  2

Solvable in 105.009s with 32.250 GiB of memory.
And this is a crash:

4, 3, 13, 9, 
15, 11, 8, 2, 
7, 5,  , 10, 
12, 1, 14, 6

however if you make several moves of the piece 1 to its proper place, the game is solved quickly.

Clipboard usage

You can copy the numeric sequence of your game to the clipboard (use 0 instead of a hole) and paste it into the game window. For example: 4 3 13 9 15 11 8 2 7 5 0 10 12 1 14 6 from the last difficult example.

Enjoy your time! 🤗

License

This code is released under a dual Apache 2.0 / MIT free software license.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the rust community for such wonderful crates.