Pizzabot

Installation Instructions: The playground should run automatically when opened. I would Ideally like to see

Improvements:

Here are a few of the improvements that I'd like to make:

• Visual output, step-by-step generated ASCII grids showing PizzaBot traversing the route
• Route optimisation, I implemented a very basic optimisation approach for finding the closest grid points and sorting from nearest to farthest implementing a solution based on the travelling salesman/vehicle routing problems would be more optimal.
• Better logging, I just have a few prints dotted around but ideally, a better way of surfacing process updates would be nicer.

Potential New Features:

PizzaBot Return to home: Have functionality to enable PizzaBot to path home once all delivery locations have been visited and a pizza dropped off. Abandoning Pizzabot in the middle/end of its route doesn't seem fair and so providing logic to allow them to return to the start location seems like the right thing to do. The functionality already exists It would be a case of creating a local route within the pizza bot from its current location (end of pizza delivery route) back to (0, 0) and sending it on its way using the existing functions, though an additional flag for returningToHome might be useful to enable/disable specific functionality, for example, it shouldn't be using the drop pizza instruction when returning home.

Support for Multiple PizzaBots: Have a new object which could be named Dispatcher which receives the input, splits the drop locations based on certain criteria (grid location, distance from the start, etc) and dispatches a unique PizzaBot to complete each split of the route based on the chosen criteria. This feature ties to the following potential features below.

Support for PizzaBot to deliver to multiple routes: Be able to parse 2 separate routes from input, pass multiple routes to PizzaBot and in series PizzaBot should be able to complete a route, return home, start the next route and continue that pattern until all routes are completed and PizzaBot returns safely home.

Support for multiple delivery grids and multiple routes of mixed input: Take the scenario that many orders for delivery come in with a wide variety of grid locations, the first 10 could belong to different grids ((0, 0) to (5, 5) OR (0, 0) to (-5, -5) OR (0, 0) to (5, -5) etc) and PizzaBot / a new entity (named Dispatcher) should be able to take those locations, assign them to the correct grid and then dispatch a PizzaBot to make the deliveries.

Code Optimisation:

Location.isWithinDeliveryZone (done)

I originally had this method within Pizzabot but felt it wasn't its responsibility so I moved it to inside Location, that way a location can check whether it is within a given grid but I don't feel that comfortable with it being here either due to needing to know about the DeliveryMap entity. Perhaps this function could live within the DeliverMap object as it already knows about Locations which better fits with Single Responsibility principles.

Pizzabot.optimiseRoute (done) This I feel could be refactored to an "Optimiser" class that can handle/perform different kinds of optimisations on the route.

Use Regex pattern matching (done):

I initially implemented this feature using higher-order functions which turned out to work but were messy, the implementation had everything in one place for parsing the input and while did support error handling and was quite robust in terms of catching failing inputs wouldn't stand up to scrutiny. Updating the implementation to use a pattern matching system would prove to be more testable, reliable, and stand up to production test cases.

Initial Brief

Introduction

As part of our continuing commitment to the latest cutting-edge pizza technology research. We call it (dramatic pause): Pizzabot. Your task is to instruct Pizzabot on how to deliver pizzas to all the houses in a neighborhood.

In more specific terms, given a grid (where each point on the grid is one house) and a list of points representing houses in need of pizza delivery, return a list of instructions for getting Pizzabot to those locations and delivering. An instruction is one of:

N: Move north
S: Move south
E: Move east
W: Move west
D: Drop pizza

Pizzabot always starts at the origin point, (0, 0). As with a Cartesian plane, this point lies at the most south-westerly point of the grid.

Therefore, given the following input:

$ ./pizzabot "5x5 (1, 3) (4, 4)"

one correct solution would be:

ENNNDEEEND

In other words: move east once and north thrice; drop a pizza; move east thrice and north once; drop a final pizza.

If you'd prefer to avoid stdin, or work predominantly in a platform that makes it difficult to use, the equivalent solution expressed as an integration test is just fine. The API is entirely up to you, as long as the test exercises functionality that accepts and returns properly formatted strings:

assertEqual(pizzabot("5x5 (1, 3) (4, 4)"), "ENNNDEEEND")

There are multiple correct ways to navigate between locations. We do not take optimality of route into account when grading: all correct solutions are good solutions.

To complete the challenge, please solve for the following exact input:

5x5 (0, 0) (1, 3) (4, 4) (4, 2) (4, 2) (0, 1) (3, 2) (2, 3) (4, 1)

Keep it simple, and have fun!