Land of Lisp

Making Dice of Doom Faster

The functional programming style can lead to slow code, at least in the hands of a novice programmer. We used the functional style to develop the core of Dice of Doom. Hence, this first version of our game is excruciatingly inefficient. We had to limit our game to a 2-by-2 board to make it playable. But now we can increase our board size to 3-by-3, as we optimize our game engine.

Let’s increase the parameters controlling the board size to make this happen. You may not want to play a game at this new size until you’ve implemented all the optimizations throughout the rest of this chapter, unless you are an extremely patient person and don’t mind having the computer take minutes building the initial game tree and deciding ...