tree-rotation

Some simple tools to test hypotheses about amortized tree operations.

Initiated by the puzzle at: https://github.com/koengit/puzzle2026

This repository contains two main components:

1. A browser playground for interactively stepping through move sequences and visualizing the resulting tree.
2. A Haskell program, tree-rotation, for exact and approximate high-score (rotations/constructors) search and plotting.

The project is licensed under the BSD 3-clause license; see LICENSE.

Web playground

The interactive page lives at play/index.html.

It is a self-contained visualization of the tree-rotation game. The page shows:

• the current counts of concatenation (C), tail (T), and rotation (R) moves and the ratio R/C,
• an SVG rendering of the current tree, omitting leaf nodes,
• a input field for the move sequence that drives the whole display.

How to play

Open play/index.html in a browser, then type a move string such as ccrtt into the input field.

• c appends a leaf on the right, consuming one available concatenation move,
• r performs a tree rotation when the current tree has the right shape,
• t takes the tail when the left subtree of the current tree is a leaf (displayed as absent).

The displayed tree and score is determined by the moves up to the current cursor position. Thus, you can step backward and forward through a longer sequence and inspect intermediate states without deleting text. If the move sequence is illegal, the tree pane shows a large red X.

Command-line solver

The executable tree-rotation solves the game by exhaustive exploration of the game tree.

By default it solves the game for the number N of concatenation moves, starting at N = 1, and keeps running for N, N+1, N+2, ... until interrupted. For each solved N, it prints the winner, i.e., the move sequence with the most rotations, and appends a CSV row with

n,score,ratio,iterations,moves

where score is the number of rotations, ratio is score / n, iterations is the search-specific work counter, and moves is the winning move trail.

Search modes

• Exact search (default): hash-map based graph search. (Very memory hungry.)
• --dfs: plain depth-first search. (Much slower, but uses little memory.)
• --random[=NNN]: best of NNNmany random playouts, defaulting to 100000.
• --mcts[=NNN]: Monte Carlo Tree Search with random rollouts, defaulting to 500 simulations per real move.
• --full: An extended game where a list of trees is maintained and concatenation can be applied to selected trees.

Command-line options

tree-rotation [--verbose] [-o|--output FILE] [--start N] [--init MOVES] [--plot] [--full]
              [--dfs | --random | --random NNN | --mcts | --mcts NNN]

• --verbose prints improving leaders during the search; quiet mode is the default.
• --output FILE selects the CSV file to append to, or the CSV file to read when plotting.
• --start N chooses the first N; the defaults are 1 for the standard game and 3 with --full.
• --init MOVES starts the single-tree search from the position reached by applying the compact move string to the usual initial board; invalid or illegal prefixes are rejected.
• --plot reads the CSV file and prints an SVG plot of N versus high-score.
• --full analyses the multi-tree game.
• --dfs, --random, and --mcts choose alternative search strategies for the standard game.

Build and run

This project is a Cabal package named tree-rotation and builds with the executable of the same name.

cabal build
cabal run tree-rotation -- --help

To locate the built executable directly:

cabal list-bin tree-rotation

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