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PODatabase Bejewelled Puzzle- How does this solution work?
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copied!<p>I'm interested in the programming challenge presented by the game Bejewelled. It seems like a simple game but programmatically it's more complex that it looks.</p> <p>In my search for hints on how the board is evaluated, I came across <a href="http://www.simple-talk.com/content/print.aspx?article=580" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this QUIZ</a> put on by the good folks at Simple-Talk. They have posted the winning answer, but I'm tarred and feathered if I can really grok how the solution works. I can see that it has something to do with matrices and grouping the cell values together with their rows and columns, but that's as far as I have gotten so far. Can anyone break it down a little further for me?</p> <p>POSTED SOLUTION (the details of the quiz are at the link above):</p> <pre><code>--====== Table matches needs to be loaded only once CREATE TABLE matches(offsetRow1 INT, offsetCol1 INT, offsetRow2 INT, ofsetCol2 INT, directions VARCHAR(20)) -- for horizontal INSERT INTO matches VALUES(-1, -1, -1, -2, 'up') INSERT INTO matches VALUES(-1, -1, -1, 1, 'up') INSERT INTO matches VALUES(-1, 1, -1, 2, 'up') INSERT INTO matches VALUES( 1, -1, 1, -2, 'down') INSERT INTO matches VALUES( 1, -1, 1, 1, 'down') INSERT INTO matches VALUES( 1, 1, 1, 2, 'down') INSERT INTO matches VALUES( 0, -2, 0, -3, 'left') INSERT INTO matches VALUES( 0, 2, 0, 3, 'right') -- for verical INSERT INTO matches VALUES(-2, -1, -1, -1, 'left') INSERT INTO matches VALUES(-1, -1, 1, -1, 'left') INSERT INTO matches VALUES( 1, -1, 2, -1, 'left') INSERT INTO matches VALUES(-2, 1, -1, 1, 'right') INSERT INTO matches VALUES(-1, 1, 1, 1, 'right') INSERT INTO matches VALUES( 1, 1, 2, 1, 'right') INSERT INTO matches VALUES(-2, 0, -3, 0, 'up') INSERT INTO matches VALUES( 2, 0, 3, 0, 'down') --================================================== ;WITH CTE AS ( SELECT [Row] = CAST( [#] AS INT ), [Col] = CAST( [Col] AS INT ), [Value] FROM bejeweled UNPIVOT ([Value] FOR [Col] IN ([1],[2],[3],[4],[5],[6],[7],[8],[9])) unpvt ) SELECT DISTINCT T.Row, T.Col, T.Value, directions FROM CTE T JOIN CTE T1 ON T.Value = T1.Value JOIN CTE T2 ON T.Value = T2.Value JOIN matches ON (T1.Row - T.Row) = offsetRow1 AND (T1.Col - T.Col) = offsetCol1 AND (T2.Row - T.Row) = offsetRow2 AND (T2.Col - T.Col) = ofsetCol2 ORDER BY T.Row, T.Col </code></pre>

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