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Ball Sort Puzzle Solver

A Kotlin application to automatically solve the Ball Sort Puzzle game for Android.

Project Status

This project is still under active development, but it has already reached a stable stage. I have been able to verify and successfully resolve all the original 300 levels of the game, and it should be easy enough to extend it for more levels and colors.

Screenshot

Ball Sort Puzzle Solver running in the terminal

Installation and Setup Instructions

You will need Maven installed and configured onto your machine.

Cloning the repository:

  1. Run git clone https://github.com/CianciuStyles/ball-sort-puzzle-solver.git in the terminal

Installation:

  1. Run mvn clean install in the terminal

To run the test suite:

  1. Run mvn test in the terminal

To run Ball Sort Puzzle Solver:

  1. Change the board declaration in main.kt to reflect the initial configuration of the level you are trying to solve. A valid declaration is made of:
    • One line per stack, plus one or two empty lines for the empty stacks
    • Each line made of one letter per color (take the Color enum as reference)
  2. Run mvn clean compile in the terminal to re-compile the project.
  3. Run mvn exec:java in the terminal to run the solver.

Motivation

I have started playing Ball Sort Puzzle and after the first levels had gone quite smoothly, I quickly ran into some harder levels which I was not able to solve by myself. Rather than simply looking for a walkthrough on the Internet, I decided to implement a program that could (hopefully) solve any level, present or future, of the game.

The main algorithm used in the implementation of this solver is the A* search algorithm, which is widely used in graph traversal and search problems. The heuristic function I have come up with to estimate how far away a state is from the final configuration should be able to provide the optimal solution, i.e. the one requiring the least amount possible of steps to complete the level.

Future work and improvements

  • Provide a GUI to input the level configuration
  • Provide a GUI to show the required steps to complete the level
  • Add more search algorithms to solve the levels
  • Expose Ball Sort Puzzle Solver as-a-Service over REST or GraphQL
  • Make it control an Android phone directly to:
    • take a screenshot of the initial level configuration
    • perform the steps to complete the level automatically