gold-mine

Riipen's technical interview "Gold Mine" problem.

Exercise

Given a gold mine of n * m dimensions, design an algorithm for a gold miner to collect as much gold as possible. Each field in this mine contains a positive integer which is the amount of gold in that space. The miner starts at the first column but can be at any row. The miner can only move right, diagonally right and up, or diagonally right and down. The miner cannot repeat it's previous move (ie. if it's previous move was diagonally right and up, it can only move right or diagonally right and down on its current move).

If the miner leaves the mine for any reason (goes outside the dimensions of the mine), gold collection will cease and the final score will be the current score.

If the miner lands on a section of the mine that has zero gold (an integer value of 0), gold collection will cease and the final score will be the current score.

Rules

There is no time limit
Use your best discretion with the design of your solution
You can ask questions
You are free to add packages, tools, or improvements as you see fit
We expect you write the kind of feature you would put into production, including tests and documentation as you see fit

Submission

Fork this repository to your Github account. Make any of the changes you wish to make, then submit a pull request back up stream to this repository.

If you can score in the top 10 of all time submissions, your name will be added to our leader board.

Setup

Node

Install nvm via the instructions here, something like:

$ curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/${VERSION}/install.sh | bash

Install node 10.16.3 (currently latest LTS):

nvm install --lts
nvm use --lts

Upgrade npm and install local dependencies:

npm install npm@latest -g
npm install

Run

To run the miner through all mines:

$ npm start

This will give you your score per mine, as well as your final score.

To run the miner through a specific mine:

$ npm run mine -- jupiter

This will run the miner through the "jupiter" mine. (All mines can be found in the mines/ directory.)

Architecture

The current naive approach to mining can be found in src/move.js. Your job will be to improve upon the existing implementation in order to collect as much gold as possible.

You should not need to touch any of the other existing files.

Contact

We encourage you to use your best discretion, but also to ask questions and communicate if you need it.

JoelHobson/gold-mine