Same GNOME

Yesterday I was just playing around with UBuntu 8.04 Desktop version. Normally I keep trying some command line utilities whenever I work on any Linux flavor but yesterday for a change I started playing few games. While trying out few games I came across a beautiful game called “Same GNOME”. What a beauty! Though I am not a game buff but really became a fan of this game. The game is very simple you just need to find the balls of same color that are adjacent to each other and click on them, on clicking all these balls vanish (there should be at least two adjacent balls of same color for vanishing), the more number of adjacent balls you can the more points you score. While playing the game I was really impressed the underlying logic of this game, here it goes

1. Whenever I place mouse on any ball there is an algorithm which looks for all the balls of same color that are adjacent to it and start blinking them so that the user can get idea how many balls will vanish.

2. The game ends in one of two scenario’s

a) All the balls have vanished.
b) There is no further scope of vanishing of the existing balls (for balls to vanish there should be at least 2 balls of same color adjacent to each other). This means there is some background thread which keeps polling after every sequence of ball vanishing whether there are any adjacent ball group available or not. I would really love to write an algorithm for doing such type of look up.

So here is home work for me (Oops office work for me as I can’t cut down my sleeping hours at home) to come up with the algorithms of the above defined scenarios.