2010-03-28:
Because, uhg, no actual progress has been made.
With hardly any work friday or saturday I worked on the Maze. Part of Sunday too. But four different algorithms later I still can't beat my original one, to say nothing about making the guy smarter.
It seems a simple enough request, really. When you visit a square, increment a number that tells how many times you've been here. If you come here again, and there's a choice of going one way or the other, chose the path you've least visited. Simple, right?
NO.
He either goes careening off the top of the maze, or around in a circle, or back and forth-back and forth between two points. AARG. I even tried a totally different way of looking at the maze, of choosing a target dot, finding the shortest path to the dot, the heading to the dot until you get to the dot, then choose a different dot. I can't give my little guy the intelligence of a worm properly, no wonder I don't have my own personal robot servant that looks like a perky sixteen year old girl and who can fight like Neo. But I digress. Two days wasted on this exercise.
Well, I can't call it totally wasted, can I? There are people in the world who spent the last two days on a couch, (not you mom, you broke your ankle, it's okay) and just passively consumed whatever photons poured forth from the Magic Happy Wall Screen. At least I sat and thought about maze theory and integer arrays and why I didn't want to use recursion and "WHY DID HE JUST GO THROUGH THE WALL????". Any use of brainpower that has you scratching your head and wondering if there wasn't a better way to do this task and trying different things and looking stuff up can't be called wasted. Right? Am I right? Right?
Time for the Magic Happy Wall Screen!
Anyway, Friday we ended up the year (or started the next one, whatever the case may be) in D.G.H. There was debauchery, there were dragons, (the two are not mixed) there was a mystery to solve, there was the ultimate plan, by me, to solve said mysteries. Wouldn't it be great if, in a real life court, you could just take control of someone and force them to tell the truth? That's what we did. It's called situational ethics. It worked- the truth came out. That's all that matters.
You would think Mizzy would be all, "courtroom! Oh yeah, my time to shine" but... no. Oh well.
Umm... Calls! Not twelve, but enough to book tomorrow and part of Tuesday. So that's good, considering the horribly lax week I've just spent. Not that I'm complaining, or anything, just let's not have too many of them until my car, and then house are paid off. K?
Regular stuff on tap for tomorrow, another tome of mystery to excite my imagination, and wholesome food for my kitties and myself. Three jobs after that. Not sure what to do about the Maze thing. The whole point of rewriting it was to make him smarter. Maybe I'll just think about it a couple more days, see if I can come up with something on paper that works better.