Animals

An elixir implementation of the animals guessing game.

The animals game works as follows: the computer asks questions to try to guess an animal you are thinking about. Eventually it will ask for example, "is your animal a dog?". If it can't guess your animal, it asks for the name of the animal as well as a question which it can use to differentiate between other animals. It saves it's animal data in ~/.animals so it will continue to "learn" about more animals from one play to another.

I have no idea who originally wrote this, it goes back at least to the 80's, I suspect earlier. If anyone knows, and can provide a reference with some better support than, "it was me," let me know and point me to references.

Install

Install Elixir

build the project with:

mix deps.get
mix test
mix escript.build

At this point, you can copy the animals executable to any directory in your path, or just run in place.

sudo cp animals /usr/local/bin
chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/animals

Run

run the program:

$ animals

or if running animals from your current directory use:

$ ./animals

The Code

The logic for the game is contained in the Animals module. The module also defines the %Animals{} struct, and an encode/decoder for the Jason module (used to serialize the data and store/load it).

The logic for the game itself is simple, it is contained in the last 15 or so lines of code at the bottom of the module. The %Animals{} struct is used to arrange the date in a binary tree which is module walks to guess an animal.

There are 4 callbacks used to abstract the UI from the games logic.

The Animals.CLI module contains the escript main function, the callbacks for the Animals module, the load/save functions to save state between runs.

ToDO

It may be wishful thinking, but at some point, I may make a liveview front end for the game.