#Qt Quinto
The quinto game is played on a black and white board. Click on a cell to reverse its color and the colors of its neighbors. All cells are white at the beginning. Turn them all black to win.
Can't find the solution ? Just click "Solve" and wonder at the computer thinking for you.
Too boring to click on all these cells ? Just click "Ai" and be amazed at the computer playing for you.
(click the picture to see it full screen)
I have no clue ! I originally made it circa 2010 for a school assignment from the C course "make anything you like aka. preferably a fun video game using C/SDL/Code:Blocks". I showed it to other students and one said it was called the "quinto" game.
I use this game to try new technologies ever since. It has gone a long way. You can check the online version at https://the-quinto-game.appspot.com/
The board is converted into a set of matrices representing the current state, the links between cells and the state you want to reach (all black). Mathematically speaking those matrices are a set of equations which is solved using linear algebra (gauss pivot).
For instance a 50x50 board generates a set of 2500 equations, each with 2500 variables.
Given the side of the board is n. The solver complexity is n^4 in memory and n^4 in time. It takes some optimizations to run on current hardware for very large board:
- Intel MMX then Intel SSE2 for faster speed (math operations on 64 then 128 bits at a time)
- OpenMP for even faster speed (multi-core support)
- Boost:UBLAS for memory saving (binary variables stored as single bits rather than entire bytes)
- Qt-related optimizations for faster visual rendering (found and removed hotspots using the visual studio ultimate profiler)
The current version can solve a 300x300 board (90000x90000 equations aka 8.1 BILLION elements matrix) in less than 1 minute and 1 GB memory, then display the animation before your eyes.
Build can be initiated from Qt Creator (on your computer), from a cloud CI server or from a command prompt. Build configuration is self-contained in the .pro files.
Building will create subfolders "bin/OS-ARCH-QTVERSION-COMPILER" and copy final executables with their dependencies upon success.
A windows installer is packaged using Inno Setup. It is available in /bin/
The project has a bunch of unit tests running on the TUT framework (a simple cross-platform & header-only unit test framework).
Qt can only make a single executable per project so there is a separate project "tests.pro" for unit tests.
Code coverage is analyzed using gcov on linux. Coverage report is sent to coveralls upon completion.
gcov requires gcc (linux only) and lcov version >= 1.12 (previous versions lack important flags and can be buggy at times)
- Build on linux | gcc
- 64 bits only
- Run unit tests (with coverage)
- Upload coverage report to coveralls
- Build on Server2012 | VS 2013 Express | Qt 5.3
- Both 32 and 64 bits
- Run unit tests
- Build on Win7 | VS 2010 Ultimate, VS 2012 Ultimate, VS 2013 Ultimate
- Both 32 and 64 bits
- Run unit tests
- Package the windows installer
- Store build artefacts (exes and installers)
- Use AVX instructions for even faster equation solving !
- Try the clang compiler
- Try clang code coverage (can't be worse than gcov)
- Package a MSI installer using WIX