Solution: Maze Model

Here’s one possible solution to the Maze model. Yours will probably be different, and might be just as good. That’s the artistry of software engineering: some solutions will be faster, others use less memory, while others will be easier for other people to understand. Optimising and balancing these factors is fun!

The solution notebook can be downloaded from:

https://anaconda.org/ucl-rits/module10-mazesolution/notebook

house = {
    'living' : {
        'exits': {
            'north' : 'kitchen',
            'outside' : 'garden',
            'upstairs' : 'bedroom'
        },
        'people' : ['James'],
        'capacity' : 2
    },
    'kitchen' : {
        'exits': {
            'south' : 'living'
        },
        'people' : [],
        'capacity' : 1
    },
    'garden' : {
        'exits': {
            'inside' : 'living'
        },
        'people' : ['Sue'],
        'capacity' : 3
    },
    'bedroom' : {
        'exits': {
            'downstairs' : 'living',
            'jump' : 'garden'
        },
        'people' : [],
        'capacity' : 1
    }
}

Some important points:

• The whole solution is a complete nested structure.
• I used indenting to make the structure easier to read.
• Python allows code to continue over multiple lines, so long as sets of brackets are not finished.
• There is an Empty person list in empty rooms, so the type structure is robust to potential movements of people.
• We are nesting dictionaries and lists, with string and integer data.