Automation

No nice code snippets to show this time, but hey, we have liftoff!

Caveats:

• I'm re-reading the doors every time a tile is rotated or flipped. This isn't what I had envisioned initially, but it works. The problem with my last post was, while it worked, it didn't work with the tile randomizer I envisioned. The automator relies on finding an open door on the floor somewhere and keeping that as the "potential door." The automator then shuffles through all available tiles, and when it finds one with a matching door, proceeds with flipping it and moving it around until it can be placed. If we rotate the tile in this process, we lose track of which door it was selected to fit into the potential door. Re-reading the doors after rotation also loses the original potential door, but finds a new one in it's place. Granted, this could be done with the old method too, but frankly it was easier this way. The old way also didn't work with rectangular tiles.
• Automation is not fully complete, although it is a huge step forward. There are times when I'll end up with open doors and tiles that I know will fit, but the automator has run out of iterations.

To get this far I had to take a step back from the automator I had in place, and essentially re-write it. When the manual placer placed a tile, we have a concept of a "tile position" which is the upper left corner of the tile. The automator had no such luxury. We had to decipher the tile position given only the position of the potential door and the inner position of the selected tile.

There are a few places in the code where I got screwed up with this logic, and it was hard to track down where I messed up until I started over.

My original plan is still what I ended up sticking with! I got caught up with figuring this out and threw out Orientation in favor of Direction, thinking knowing more would help me out. However, how do you determine direction? I thought it was easy, but ended up being not worth it at all.

This is also a good example of where the brain is superior to the CPU. We can look at two jigsaw pieces and see if they fit relatively easily. A jigsaw puzzle is essentially what this automator is. A CPU, though, has no such luxury. Our brains can get caught up in making a seemingly easy task understandable by a purely logical system that can only evaluate one thing at a time.

Bugs I won;t make again:

1. I assumed only one door could match a time, and only removed one door at a time when placing.
2. I tested with doors that took up all of one side, missing a bug where the vertical/horizontal displacement of a door had to be taken into account.