TuringMachine

README

Turing Machine Companion

This repository aims to provide a companion for the "Turing Machine" board game by Scorpion Masque.

Scorpion Masque makes quite a few fun unique board games, personally I would suggest also checking out Decrypto and Sky Team.

Over the holidays I was gifted Turing Machine which my partner and I had a lot of fun playing together; furthermore, the game code generation and constraints system intrigued me as I was looking for some fun side coding project. One thing lead to another and here we are: this is a Go implementation for a turing machine game solver/generator/api with a web UI component.

Performance

The components of the main library (./src/game) have been profiled and optimized to ensure very high speed and efficiency in solving/generating games.

The games generation went from taking almost an hour to generate/sort/save all 20M possible game combinations to now taking under 5 seconds (on my laptop).

Some of the optimizations used to speed things up are:

• During game generation, make use of all available CPU cores (and merge-sort solutions)
• During game generation, skip over known invalid solutions (ex: see State.AddValidChoice() and State.NextValidChoice(...))
• Use bit-masks to speedup computations (ex: see CodeMask)
• Whenever possible, precompute answers to common calculations (ex: see newLaw(...) handling of Law.Mask)
• Whenever possible, replace maps with arrays (see ../criteria.go)
• Use a buffer to write games to disk efficiently (see ../solver.go).
• Individual function optimizations based on CPU profile analysis.

How to

No instructions are provided. This is a companion for an existing game, you need to purchase and play though the game to begin to understand how this works. Once you get a hang of the physical game you can try to figure out how to play the game using this companion software.

License

Although the code in this repository is distributed under a MIT license, the game as well as some of the assets (intentionally excluded from this repository) are property of "Le Scorpion Masque Inc".

Helpful Resources

Here are some helpful resources that helped me develop this library:

• turingmachine.info: the official site, full of sample problems
• zyle87/turing-machine-interactive-sheet: this project help me think about how to port the game UX to the web
• ThomasdenH/turing-machine-ai: a solver for the game implemented in rust
• alexander-zibert/turing-machine-board-game-solver: a solver written in c++