Michael Fogleman

Rush Hour is a 6x6 sliding block puzzle invented by Nob Yoshigahara in the 1970s. It was first sold in the United States in 1996.

I played a clone of this game on my first iPhone several years ago. Recently, I stumbled on the physical incarnation of it and instantly bought it on Amazon for my kids to play. We've been having fun with it, but naturally I was most interested in writing some code to solve the puzzles.

I did more than write a simple puzzle solver. I ended up computing every possible puzzle and built a complete database of every "interesting" starting position. It was quite challenging (and exciting!) so I wrote a whole article about it. Check it out!

I wrote my first chess engine back in college. It didn't play very well because I never really figured out the advanced search techniques. More recently, after a long hiatus, I tried my hand at writing a chess engine again, and Mister Queen is the result. It's pretty weak among computer chess engines, but it can beat me handily. Features include:

• Bitboards and "magic" bitboards for board representation and super-fast move generation.
• Custom, hash-based opening book based on over three million games from the FICS database.
• Zobrist hashing and a transposition table storing exact values and the best move.
• Null move pruning, aspiration windows, iterative deepening, quiescence search.
• Supports the Universal Chess Interface (UCI).
• Passes all perft tests.

David Kopec used Mister Queen in a chess app for the Apple TV! Read what he wrote about that here.

A very performant Minecraft clone written in just a few thousand lines of C using modern OpenGL (shaders). Online multiplayer support is included using a Python-based server. Many people have used this as a base upon which a more complex game was built.

Download

• Windows Download (2.2 MB)
• Mac Download (733 KB)

My friend introduced me to a board game called Ricochet Robot (or Rasende Roboter in its original German form). It's a fun game, but I found it even more fun as a programming problem. I implemented the game in Python, including a user interface and a solver. After that, I sped up the solver tremendously by porting it to C. My solver includes several "tricks" that make it quite fast. See these slides for more details.

Navigate your rocket through a universe filled with planets, asteroids, bumpers, teleports and items... collecting all of the stars as you go!

Objectives

• Collect all of the stars in each level.
• Complete each level as quickly as possible. You will be rewarded 1, 2 or 3 stars for each level, depending on your time.

Details

• Planets exert gravity on your rocket - don't get too close or you won't be able to escape the pull of the gravity!
• Magnets let you attract and collect stars from a greater distance!
• Shields let you plow through and destroy asteroids!
• Flames give you an instant boost in the direction you are pointing.
• Your rocket will bounce off of bumpers. Try it - it's fun (but not always helpful)!
• Teleports instantly transport you to another teleport location.

In the mid 2000s, I often played Scrabble on the Internet Scrabble Club, which was not an official Scrabble website. Thousands of people played online there, but the client was horrible and buggy. I took it upon myself to write my own client, which involved reverse engineering the protocol to communicate with the server. I discovered many security issues (cheating vectors) while doing this. But I just wanted a nice client for playing Scrabble online. I pretty much finished the client, and it worked quite nicely, but it never went much further than that and who knows if it still works.

I remember that I had a cold when I started writing this Pac-Man clone. One cool aspect of it was that levels were defined in ASCII, with different symbols representing walls, dots, pills, etc. I used SWT for the GUI. Unfortunately, I never got around to implementing the fruits that would appear in the real game.

I wrote TONS of programs in QBasic throughout high school. Most of them are lost forever, but a few have survived. I've put a couple programs, including this one, on the Internet Archive for eternal posterity, and there you can play them in the browser. This is a simple Tetris clone but it even includes a computer player that plays quite well!