hmehta's blog

By hmehta, history, 3 years ago, In English

Marathon Match 123

Topcoder MM 123 - **Jewels** is now live!

Problem SetterJacoCronje Problem Testersdimkadimon and kphmd

Problem Overview: 
Jewels is a game where you must construct horizontal or vertical lines of the same type of jewel on an NxN grid. Each cell of the grid is one of C types of jewels. In each move, you can swap any two jewels. Jewels are removed from the grid when they form a horizontal or vertical line of at least 3 matching jewels next to each other. Jewels above empty spaces fall down and can form more matching horizontal or vertical lines which will again be removed and the process repeats. Such an event is called a chain reaction. The more chain reactions you create, the more points you will score. Your task is to play the game for 1000 moves and remove as many jewels from the grid with as many chain reactions as you can. Here is a partial animation of a solution for seed=1.

Here is an animation of a solution for seed=1. (You can see the working animation here: https://mailchi.mp/topcoder/marathon-match-123)

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