8 Puzzle Perf Tooling

Today we set out to achieve the 5 goals listed on yesterday's stream:

• redfine the goal state to match what's common in the literature
• add some performance tooling, counters for explored nodes and a regular pulsing of performance info
• improve the nodes explored per sec by orders of magnitude
• implement the manhattan distance metric
• actually find the optimal solution to the hardest 8 puzzle problem!

We didn't get quite as far as I had hoped, but we did make good progress and now we can see that using A* with Hamming distance heuristic does infact search deeper than breadth first search. Overall this is important to convincing us this trek might be worthwhile.

Next week we'll start using a more Github friendly workflow of using issues and pull requests to track progress which will be a learning experience for me and I'll love your input. On that note, and feel free to contribute; I'll highlight your work on stream!

• Please share with everyone!
• Wed, Thur, Fri from 12 to 2PM EST.