I’ve got a lot of the cosmetic stuff done.

I moved the algorithm into its own class, which overall made it easier to track certain variables like its position. For the animate option (next paragraph) I had to make a move function that ran 1 generation of the algorithm, so that I could print between frames.

I made an animate option that takes in an amount of seconds and then displays an animation as the bishop moves. The only complicated part about this is that it uses an escape code to move the cursor back up, so as to give the illusion that the same printed text is moving.

I made a character set option and then got ChatGPT to generate some character sets. These follow the convention set by the actual algorithm, in which it’s just 17 characters, with 0 being empty, 15 being the start, and 16 being the ending position. I also added a bishop key so that during the animation it would show where the bishop was. To accomodate the Katakana and emoji options (I didn’t show Katakana but the emojis do show it), I had to modify the draw function to double the width of the graph. It’s still 17, just getting printed as 34 or so.

I got colors too. I just made the same dictionary as a character set but with the color names (I’m using click for the CLI, and it has an API for coloring text) as the values. I then modified the draw function to use the value of the dictionary at the key corresponding to the tile as the foreground if the colorize option was enabled.

Overall, the project has turned out pretty nice, and I will be working on the data visualization part next!