Question

I’m trying to come up with a clean function that will perform a check on a 2D Array to verify if a win has occurred in a ConnectFour game. I’m trying to work through the logic but my brain is swiss cheese right now. Here’s what I have for checking for a horizontal win. It seems to me like there should be a way to streamline this block to work in all possible directions.

private function checkForHorizontalWin(column:uint, row:uint, grid:Array):Boolean
    {
        var player:uint = grid[column][row];
        var counter:uint = 1;

        for(var i:uint = Math.min(0, uint(column-1)); i>=0; i--)
        {
            if(!grid[i][row] || grid[i][row] != player)
            {
                break;
            }
            counter++;
        }

        for(var j:uint = column+1; j<_columns; j++)
        {
            if(!grid[j][row] || grid[j][row] != player)
            {
                break;
            }
            counter++;
        }

        if(counter >=4)
        {
            return true;
        }
        else
        {
            return false;
        }

    }

Answer 1

I actually ended up doing something pretty simple…Converted the grid array to a string then look for 4 in a row…Only tricky part was getting the correct array for the diagonal possibilities but I got that worked out too.