How to improve performance of this code?

Question

Thanks to some help from people here, I was able to get my code for Tasmanian camels puzzle working. However, it is horribly slow (I think. I\'m not sure because this is my

Answer 1

Well, I can't really say quite where your algorithm is running astray, but I just went ahead and made my own. In the interest of doing the simplest thing that could possibly work, I used a bastardized version of Dijkstra's algorithm, where open nodes are visited in arbitrary order, without consideration of distance. This means I don't have to come up with a heuristic.

""" notation: a game state is a string containing angle
    brackets ('>' and '<') and blanks
 '>>> <<<'

 """

def get_moves(game):
    result = []
    lg = len(game)
    for i in range(lg):
        if game[i] == '>':
            if i < lg-1 and game[i+1] == ' ': # '> ' -> ' >'
                result.append(game[:i]+' >'+game[i+2:])
            if i < lg-2 and game[i+1] != ' ' and game[i+2] == ' ': # '>< ' -> ' <>'
                result.append(game[:i]+' '+game[i+1]+'>'+game[i+3:])
        if game[i] == '<':
            if i >= 1 and game[i-1] == ' ': # ' <' -> '< '
                result.append(game[:i-1]+'< '+game[i+1:])
            if i >= 2 and game[i-1] != ' ' and game[i-2] == ' ': # ' ><' -> '<> '
                result.append(game[:i-2]+'<'+game[i-1]+' '+game[i+1:])
    return result



def wander(start, stop):
    fringe = [start]
    paths = {}

    paths[start] = ()

    def visit(state):
      path = paths[state]
      moves = [move for move in get_moves(state) if move not in paths]
      for move in moves:
          paths[move] = paths[state] + (state,)
      fringe.extend(moves)

    while stop not in paths:
      visit(fringe.pop())

    print "still open: ", len(fringe)
    print "area covered: " , len(paths)
    return paths[stop] + (stop,)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    start = '>>>> <<<<'
    stop = '<<<< >>>>'
    print start, "   -->   ", stop
    pathway = wander(start,stop)
    print len(pathway), "moves: ", pathway