Automated Solution Developed to yet Manually Solved Architectural Problem
Five students from BDesign, BCA and BBA-LLB with two faculty members designed the standard approach to find solution to unsolved “Tree-Tent” puzzle. This puzzle is undertaken as a part of interdisciplinary course “Interactive Games – How Computer Think and Act?” mentored by faculty Prof. Yogesh Chaudhari.
Tree tent is an architectural puzzle from genre of mathematical puzzle and board games. The aim of the puzzle is to arrange required number of tents in landscape without cutting trees and maintaining the architectural aspects of privacy, ventilation and mobility.
The abstract model of this puzzle is realized in practice and to name a few are Income-Tax department building of Govt. of India in New-Delhi and project of transforming Poveglia Island, located between Venice and Lido, Italy into Dream University.
This genre was invented by Léon Balmaekers and was first published in the Dutch puzzle magazine Breinbrekers in 1989, where it was named "Alle ballen verzamelen". Since then, no systematic approach is available to solve the puzzle and hence being solved manually with intuitions.
The team achieved success in design of systematic approach after working for over a period of last two years. The computer application and simulation for generation of puzzle is developed jointly by Prof. Yogesh Chaudhari and Prof. Kruti Patel. The application to solve puzzle is independently developed by Prof. Yogesh Chaudhari.
The number of steps taken to solve the puzzle is exponential function and it is proportional to number of trees in landscape, to be exact it is 4T where T represents number of trees in a puzzle i.e. with just 20 trees in landscape, it will take 420 steps to generate solution. In other words, solution to landscape with just 20 trees will take 35 years to generate solution on computer that is fast enough to take 1000 steps per second.
Students of School of Environmental Design and Architecure who studied this puzzle and designed the approach are Dipalben Prakashchandra Shah (12191007) Aditi Dhiresh Patalia (14191005) Rashi Praful Faldu (14191026) Shivanginiben Nileshkumar Pancholi (14191032) and Vishakha Kalpeshbhai Soni (14192022). The hardware model is designed by undergraduate students, Apurva Mandalia (14102013) of BCA and Nirmit Shah (15132007) of integrated BBA-LLB programs.
