SameGame

Same Game, and The Same Game is a popular computer puzzle game that has been implemented in various variants on a variety of platforms. There are versions for mobile phones, graphic calculators, game consoles, and for virtually any form of computers in the true sense. Often, the game is distributed as freeware or under an open source license.

Game

In SameGame a rectangular playing field is filled with tiles of different varieties. The stones are arranged in columns and rows. The game is a single player game. The player tries to remove as many bricks from the board. It can only remove stones that are adjacent to other stones of the same kind. All similar adjacent stones are then removed together. Stones, which are located above the distant rocks, fall down, or move columns in from the right, if an entire column is free. This gives rise by almost every train the player new stone combinations (except when the remote stones have all found at the top of the rock volume). Depending on the control variant the player receives for each remote stone points or depending on the number of removed at a stroke stones. Common are also bonus systems. In some versions, the required number of features is evaluated, which was necessary to achieve a certain point standings (or the full Abräumens the playing field ).

Typical variations of the game organize three to five types of stone happened to be in ten to twenty columns and eight to twelve lines. Sometimes this can also be set by the player. The difficulty increases with the number of types of stone.

Due to the widespread use of colorful and sometimes kitschy images for game pieces and backgrounds, accompanied by animations and accompanied by various sound effects, the game often has the character of a typical " Daddelspiels ".

Theory

Despite the simple rules SameGame is a sophisticated, abstract logic game, which was also studied in complexity theoretical papers in theoretical computer science. Even the question of whether a field can be completely emptied, is for non-trivial cases, is NP-complete (very difficult to solve ). A game field is hearts content in the shortest possible sequence of moves a difficult optimization problem that can only be solved heuristically in an acceptable computational time due to the NP- completeness. SameGame is therefore also suitable to test new optimization methods. What is interesting is the fact that unlike other NP- complete problems (eg traveling salesman problem ends, Eng. Traveling Salesman Problem ), each turn and thus each optimization step irreversible affects all following trains, and thus may will be decided in the first step of the success of the whole optimization trial. Common heuristic solution strategies that attempt to achieve global minima by local optimizations come therefore to difficulties (eg, simulated annealing ).

Same Game is different from some other simple computer games such as Tetris, in that it belongs to the class of games with complete information, ie, at any time of the game the player is the state of the game and to make all possible future positions can be derived from this condition without random elements act. Games such as chess and Go also belong to this class of games.

Unlike good solution method, the game itself is easy to program and therefore is also suitable for training.

History

Same Game was originally invented in 1985 as a 'Chain Shot' of Moribe Kuniaki and spread in a Japanese computer magazine. Under the name SameGame it appeared in 1992 in a version of Unix for Eiji Fukomoto. The game is ( a freeware version ) also become popular under the name " Clickomania ". In some devices it is installed under the name " Jawbreaker ."