The 8-puzzle is a more simple variation of the better-known 15-puzzle. This game engine uses simple heuristics and complex game engine algorithms to solve the puzzle for any solvable game board. To learn more about the 8-puzzle visit this site.

• Install the MinGW C++ compiler
• Clone this repository to your computer
• Configure the game engine settings (optional)
• Run the compile.bat script to create the executable program
• Run the newly created main.exe file from the command line

You can configure the settings for the game engine by modifying the gameEngineSettings.h file in the Game directory. You must recompile the program after making changes. The following settings may be changes from this file:

• Number of games to be played
• The difficulty of the boards to be solved (more difficult boards require more moves to solve)
• Whether to show the step-by-step moves for each solution
• Which algorithm should be used as a heuristic to find a solution

The algorithms use heuristics to quantify how good or bad a given game state is; smaller values indicate that a game state is almost solved, while larger values indicate that a game state is no where near being solved.

The game engine starts with a game state that needs to be solved. The engine recursively calculates the valid moves from the current game state to subsequent game states effectively building a tree of all possible game states.

Duplicate game states are not considered, an optimization which allows us to use an exhaustive search. This optimization is implemented using a map which keeps track of which games states have already been visited.

The solution state is then found within the tree and a path from the root node to the solution node can be easily found; this path represents the moves that must be made to transform the initial game state to the solved game state.