Gif Scratch off

My name is Fawaz Joseph and I would like thank everyone involved in creating this Hackathon.

Inspiration

I was inspired by the base tutorial for the Project. I, like a lot of people also like gifs so I wanted a way to put a 4x4 sliding puzzle and ways to discover gifs to use on Twitter.

What it does

You get a random gif from giphy.org based on an optional tag. This can be"dog", "reaction", "funny", e.t.c In the beginning, the gif is covered by the tiles The tiles become transparent once they are in the correct place. When all the tiles are correct and the puzzle is solved, you can see your random gif. You can also get hints or get it solved for you.

How we built it

It was built using Giphy API to get the gif, particularly the random endpoint. The PuzzleBoard was created using Stack and AnimatedPosition and also various implicit Animated Widget Containers were used for the various decoration to highlight the states (movable, solved) There are snack bars and progress bars to indicate messages and progress respectively

Challenges we ran into

Learning how to write an algorithm to solve a puzzle. Not being able to release on the web because of compute() doesn't work on web

Accomplishments that we're proud of

First is the algorithm to determine whether a Puzzle is solvable or not. The second was implementing a solver. This is what is used to get hints and play the game for the user. It was amazing to learn all the algorithms again. When all the tests passed, I felt so good. It felt like I was back in college. I had to create an A* solving algorithm but that was too slow so I iterated to an iterative deep A* Figuring the heuristics was amazing. Manhattan Distance, hamming distance, number of Inversions, linear conflict. I had to read a lot and It was so fun. Thank you for creating this hackathon. I learned a lot!!