Territories in a C++ Risk Clone - c++

For fun, I've been programming a Risk clone in C++ and I need some help with the territories/Continents part of it. Setting them up so that they know what territories are adjacent to them, what Continent it is apart of, who currently controls it and of course the amount of armies currently in it.
Likewise, the Continent needs to know all the territories that are in it, so a player who controls the whole Continent gets corresponding reinforcement bonus for that Continent.
Currently, I think a using std::set may be the best choice, but I need some suggestions on how to set it up.

Create a graph where each Territory object has an array (vector/whatever) of other territories it is adjacent to. Then have a Continent object for each continent which has a list of territories that are in it.
At end of each turn check to see that all territories in a continent all belong to the same player and if so give that player the extra resources defined by the continent. The territories themselves will be updated after each fight in a turn.
an std::vector should be more than sufficient, no need to complicate things.

You might consider using the boost graph library to make the country graph. A std::map could then take countries to continents, or a std::multimap to go the other direction.

Related

Google Org Charts Display Functionality

I'm using Google Org charts and I need to have a child element have 3 parents above it - is this possible? For example a situation where an employee has three bosses.
No, the parent column only accepts one id. Which is lucky for the employee with 3 bosses because maybe it will help them sort out who the employee actually reports to.
As a conceptual work-around you could establish the three bosses as a single entity like "The Triumverate", "The Tribunal", or whatever and then put the employee under that entity. Or have a node with 3 comma-seperated names like "Mike, John, Susan", and then use "Mike, John, Susan" as the parent node for the poor confused employee.
This is one case where, while I know these things happen, when you're formalizing this you should really be asking, "Why does this employee have 3 bosses?" It's really very confusing for both the employees and the bosses 99% of the time. It is often best to pick one boss for them to report to and then have all the bosses communicate sideways to each other. The only exception that I can think of is a shared receptionist somewhere like a Doctor's Office with multiple doctors. And even then it might help for the receptionist to have one formal boss who has the right to discipline, fire, give them a raise, and two other superiors that just use their services. Helps a lot if the employee encounters conflicting orders.
But of course, that's not what you asked for. But it is probably why they didn't make nodes support multiple parent nodes.

How do I find if any names in a list of names appears in a paragraph with ColdFusion?

Assume that I have a list of employee names from a database (thousands, potentially tens-of-thousands in the near future). To make the problem simpler assume that each firstname/lastname combination is unique (a big if, but a tangent).
I also have a RSS stream of news content that pertains to the business (again, could be in the hundreds of items per day).
What I would like to do is detect if an employees name appears in the several paragraph news item and, if so, 'tag' the item with the person its talking about.
There may be more than one employee named in a single news item so breaking the loop after the first positive match isn't a possibility.
I can certainly brute force things: for every news item, loop over each and every employee name and if a regex expression returns a match, make note of it.
Is there a simpler way in ColdFusion or should I just get on with my nested loops?
Just throwing this out there as something you could do...
It sounds like you'll almost unanimously have significantly more employee names than words per post. Here's how I might handle it:
Have an always-running CF app that will pull in the feeds and onAppStart
Grab all employees from your db
Create an app-scoped look up struct with first names as keys and a struct of last names as values ( you could also add middle names sibling to last names with a 3rd tier if desired ).
So one key in the look up might be "Vanessa" with a struct with 2 keys ( "Johnson" and "Forta" ) as its value.
Then, each article you parse, just listToArray with a space as a delimiter and loop through the array doing a simple structKeyExists with each token. For matches, check the next item in the array as a last name.
I'd guess this would be much more performant processingwise than doing however many searches and also take almost no time to code and you can feed in any future sources extremely simply ( your checker takes one argument, any text on Earth ).
Interested to see what route you go and whether your experiments expose anything new about performance in CF.
Matthew, you have a tall order there, and there are really multiple parts to the challenge/solution. But just in terms of comparing a list of values to a given set of text to see if one of them occur in there, you'll find that there's no one could CF function. BEcause of that, I created a new one, findList, available at cflib:
http://cflib.org/index.cfm?event=page.udfbyid&udfid=1908
It's not perfect, nor as optimal as it could be, but it may be a useful first step or you, or give you some ideas. That said, it suited my need (determine if a given blog comment had reference to any of the blacklisted words). I show it comparing a list of URLs, but it could be any words at all. Hope that's a little helpful.
Another option worth exploring is leveraging the Solr engine that ships with CF now. It will do the string search heavy lifting for you and you can probably focus on dynamically keeping your collections up to date and optimized as new feed items come in.
Good luck!

django models question

I am working on a django model and not being a database expert I could use some advice. I essentially have a model which contains a many to many relationship with another model. But I need to store unique values for each relationship each time I include something.
So for instance in chemistry you may have many elements that include hydrogen, but each element has a unique amount of hydrogen in it. So for instance a water entry would be connected to hydrogen and oxygen and the amount would be two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen.
I want hydrogen and water in this scenario to be stored in the database as elements, so I can query against them for other elements using them.
What is the best way to model this?
Thanks!
Read the documentaion here and pay close attention to the Beatles example, it's exactly what you need.
Person -> Element
Group -> Chemical_Compound
Membership -> Element_2_Chemical
Element_2_Chemical should have an int field which details how many elements you have in each chemical compound.
In your metaphor, you say "I want hydrogen and water in this scenario to be stored in the database as elements, so I can query against them for other elements using them."
Does it mean that "water" may be on any part of the relationship you are modeling? Do "water" relate to "hydrogen" in the (almost) same way as "milk" relates to "water"?
If the answer is Yes, then you should use a directed-acyclic-graph model (hopefully, you won't have cycles in your relationship: A->B->C->A). Look into the django-dag ( http://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-dag/ ) and django-treebeard-dag ( http://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-treebeard-dag/0.2 ) packages.
If the answer in No, so yo have a clear distinction between what's a "container" and what's a "containee", use a normal many-to-many rel between two different models, like the "Membership" example in django documentation ( https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/models/#extra-fields-on-many-to-many-relationships ).
In any case you'll have to add more info to the "edge" of the relationship.
Following strictly your chemical metaphor, you are maybe not modeling enough information, because some molecules have the same composition but different structure (they are called "isomers"). For instance the pentane, the 2-methylbutane and the 2,2-dimethylpropane have all five carbons and twelve hydrogens, but they are very different one another...
With this I am saying that when you are doing an "enhanced many-to-many" it's generally a complex model, so take care of not leaving anything out of it.

Supporting multi-add/delete (and undo/redo) with a QAbstractItemModel (C++)

Greetings,
I've been writing some nasty code to support the undo/redo of deletion of an arbitrary set of objects from my model. I feel like I'm going about this correctly, as all the other mutators (adding/copy-pasting) are subsets of this functionality.
The code is nastier than it needs to me, mostly because the only way to mutate the model involves calling beginInsertRows/beginRemoveRows and removing the rows in a range (just doing 1 row at a time, no need to optimize "neighbors" into a single call yet)
The problem with beginInsertRows/beginRemoveRows is that removal of a row could affect another QModelIndex (say, one cached in a list). For instance:
ParentObj
->ChildObj1
->ChildObj2
->ChildObj3
Say I select ChildObj1 and ChildObj3 and delete them, if I remove ChildObj1 first I've changed ChildObj3's QModelIndex (row is now different). Similar issues occur if I delete a parent object (but I've fixed this by "pruning" children from the list of objects).
Here are the ways I've thought of working around this interface limitation, but I thought I'd ask for a better one before forging ahead:
Move "backwards", assuming a provided list of QModelIndices is orderered from top to bottom just go from bottom up. This really requires sorting to be reliable, and the sort would probably be something naive and slow (maybe there's a smart way of sorting a collection of QModelIndexes? Or does QItemSelectionModel provide good (ordered) lists?)
Update other QModelIndeces each time an object is removed/added (can't think of a non-naive solution, search the list, get new QModelIndeces where needed)
Since updating the actual data is easy, just update the data and rebuild the model. This seems grotesque, and I can imagine it getting quite slow with large sets of data.
Those are the ideas I've got currently. I'm working on option 1 right now.
Regards,
Dan O
Think of beginRemoveRows/endRemoveRows, etc. as methods to ask the QAbstractItemModel base class to fix up your persistent model indexes for you instead of just a way of updating views, and try not to confuse the QAbstractItemModel base class in its work on those indexes. Check out http://labs.trolltech.com/page/Projects/Itemview/Modeltest to exercise your model and see if you are keeping the QAbstractItemModel base class happy.
Where QPersistentModelIndex does not help is if you want to keep your undo/redo data outside of the model. I built a model that is heavily edited, and I did not want to try keeping everything in the model. I store the undo/redo data on the undo stack. The problem is that if you edit a column, storing the persistent index of that column on the undo stack, and then delete the row holding that column, the column's persistent index becomes invalid.
What I do is keep both a persistent model index, and a "historical" regular QModelIndex. When it's time to undo/redo, I check if the persistent index has become invalid. If it has, I pass the historical QModelIndex to a special method of my model to ask it to recreate the index, based on the row, column, and internalPointer. Since all of my edits are on the undo stack, by the time I've backed up to that column edit on the undo stack, the row is sure to be there in the model. I keep enough state in the internalPointer to recreate the original index.
I would consider using a "all-data" model and a filter proxy model with the data model. Data would only be added to the all-data model, and never removed. That way, you could store your undo/redo information with references to that model. (May I suggest QPersistentModelIndex?). Your data model could also track what should be shown, somehow. The filter model would then only return information for the items that should be shown at a given time.

Modeling question: Lists that depends on each other, but can be specialized entries?

Trust me, I've put a lot of thought into this problem before asking here, and I think I got a solution, but I'd like to see what you guys can come up with before settling for my own :)
SCENARIO:
In the domain we got 3 entities: A treatment, a beautyshop and an employee. A beautyshop can hire 0 to many employees. Now, a beautysalon has a list of possible treatments it can do for its costumers. Each treatment has a description, a duration and a price. Each employee has a similar list, but each employee can specialize each treatment (different price or duration), add new treatments or "remove" treatments derived from the beautyshop.
.. This seems like a rather common problem to me, so I was hoping someone could come up with something clever :)
So far, Im thinking about letting each treatment have a unique id, and then let the employee list insert treatments by itself which will have the same id as the one from the shop. These employee treatments will then override the shop ones with the same id..
Thanks in advance
Are We talking about the objective representation of the problem or about the database representation of the problem? If it's the objective representation, than a specialized treatment should just be a subclass of the generic treatment.
With the relational database representation of the problem, things get a bit harder:
beautyshop ---= employee
beautyshop ---= treatment_type
treatment_type ---= treatment
employee =--= treatment
(---= is one to many, =--= is many to many).
But how do We get a list of treatments available in a beautyshop? We don't. Instead We get a list of treatments available from all beautyshop employees. That said, if a beautyshop has 0 employees, it serves no treatments.
You might use null fields in treatment table to indicate that the particular employee serves this treatment with default properties. If the treatment_type's defaults change for particular beautyshop, then all treatments are updated.
I would suggest adding some kind of inheritance/specialization mechanism to the Treatments by adding a parentTreatment reference to the Treatment class. You would have a set of standard Treatments, and each Employee would be able to select and customize them.
The BeautySalons wouldn't explicitly store any Treatments, a transient and volatile getAvailableTreatments() method would iterate over the associated Employees and aggregate the parent Treatments of the Treatments offered by each Employee.
Why do you want to have different treatments with the same ID?
I'd rather set up a "custom treatment" ID.