SAGA Alien invasion

Golang solution for the SAGA Alien Invasion problem.

Build and Run

From root directory

• go build
• ./aliens --aliensNumber=<N> --inputFile=<input_file_path> [--verbose] with N as the number of aliens playing the game.

Alternative make run for faster iterations with the default params.

Input File

It's a txt file with the following format:

Foo north=Bar west=Baz south=Qu-ux
Bar south=Foo west=Bee

Assumption: the data should be consistent (e.g.: if Foo north=Bar, there should also be Bar south=Foo), otherwise it will throw an exception (see TestLoadCityMapFailure)

Run Tests

Just run make test or go test <local_test_dir> to run specific tests.

Further Optimizations

For sake of simplicity there is not a lot of redundancy. Although, for improved efficiency it's advised to introduce redundant data structures to avoid sequential access of large arrays. E.g.: keep a pointer in the aliens list of the current city for each alien to avoid iterating through the city to find the alien.

Also, the implementation lean towards readability rather than performance, having several duplicated sequential accesses. Improving the performance would require a slightly different approach.