Welcome to the Puzzle Block Challenge. This challenge is based on the Block Puzzle Jewel game from hua weiwei available on Android. From the author:

The goal is to drop blocks in order to create and destroy full lines on the screen both vertically and horizontally. Don't forget to keep the blocks from filling the screen in this addictive puzzle game.

This challenge provides a working implementation of the game, built in C#. The implementation comes with a few different versions of the player, each performing differently. The player implementation is modeled in classes that derive from the IPlayer interface, which are instantiated and passed to the Game object.

The purpose of this challenge is to code a new implementation of the IPlayer interface, which will beat all other implementations by gaining the highest score.

• You may alter the implementation of the game only for the purpose of supporting your IPlayer implementation
  • Do NOT, for example, alter the definition of Shape or the way the score is calculated
• Fork the main branch and push your implementation there. The implementation will be compared to master to make sure no cheats were introduced
• You can start from one of the built-in implementation of IPlayer, including SingleStepGreedyPlayer, MultiFactorSingleStepPlayer or FullEvalPlayerBase and modify it, or
• You can start from your own clean implementation of IPlayer directly. For more information, see How to implement the Player.

We have 3 different challenge categories. Anyone can participate in any or all of the challenges.

In this challenge, the main measure is the final score. Each implementation will be executed 3 times. Only the highest score will be considered. The winner is the implementation that reaches the highest score. If two competing implementations get to the same final score, the one that ran for the shortest time wins.

Each run will be executed using a predetermined seed, so that it will be possible to compare results in identical conditions.

When evaluating the different implementations, the program will be executed 5 times, each time with a different seed. Only the seed that produced the highest score (for each implementation) will be considered.

In this challenge, the main measure is runtime duration. We will pick a single IPlayer implementation, and the Game implementation that will be able to execute in the shortest duration wins.

This challenge is similar to the Score Challenge, but will require the implementation to use some form of Machine Learning technique in order to beat the highest score.

To get started, clone PuzzleBlock and start coding. For further reading:

• The Solution Structure
• The IPlayer Interface
• How to implement the Player
• Testing