8 Tile Puzzle Solver

This was the final project for my ICS 361 AI class, which is also the class that grows my interest in AI but that is a story for another day.In this project, I had to implement A* and Breadth-first search in Prolog to solve the 8-tiles puzzle by finding a solution path from a given start. The main intention of this project was to show the difference between Clisp and Prolog because there was a previous project on this problem in Clisp.

This was a difficult project that cost a lot of times and works despite the previous experience. The main reason is the lack of experience in Prolog and declarative language because unlike programming language I learned before (Java/C++), Prolog programs are built with rules, a lot, and a lot of rules and some functions to put those rules to work. So, after a lot of research online, I found out the “easy” way is to write out all 48 moves of the 8-tile puzzle game as Prolog rules. It was an unbelievable fact to accept because in Clisp I just need few generator functions.

(24 of the 48 rules)

Actually, half of my research time was on how to do the project without writing all 48 rules and even though I went back to doing it the “easy” way, I learned a lot from my searches. This is also a lesson make me appreciate each language more by knowing the advantages and disadvantages.

You can find my source code.