More evidence of Authority progress, y’all. Authority uses a new, different algorithm to check for connections compared to the method used in Territory (the concept of ‘connected territory’ is present in Authority as well, although it’s completely different to the way it works in Territory). It doesn’t have a name, since I wrote it myself, but I’m sure there is an essentially identical one out there that does have a name; it’s about as simple as you can get (since we’re not trying to find the shortest path to something, the distance travelled is irrelevant) and I imagine it’s prototypical of all the fancier searching algorithms (Dijkstra’s/BFS/A* et al.). Anyway, it’s faster and far less complex than the old one, which is good because in Authority there’s going to be a lot more connection checking going on.
Now, it’s not terribly exciting, but nevertheless you can try it out for yourself (text-based; no pretty graphics here).
So you could … use that algorithm to calculate the 3BV of a random Minesweeper game? We need to talk a little on IRC… ;)