A variant of Race Tracks involves Hoppers. Hoppers are people on a jump stick who can jump from one square to the other, without touching the squares in between (a bit like a knight in chess). Just like the aforementioned cars, they can pick up speed and make bigger hops, but their acceleration per move is limited, and they also have a maximum speed.
Let's be a bit more formal: our variant of Race Tracks is played on a rectangular grid, where each square on the grid is either empty or occupied. While hoppers can fly over any square, they can only land on empty squares. At any point in time, a hopper has a velocity (x,y), where x and y are the speed (in squares) parallel to the grid. Thus, a speed of (2,1) corresponds to a knight jump, (as does (-2,1) and 6 other speeds).
To determine the hops a hopper can make, we need to know how much speed he can pick up or lose: either -1, 0, or 1 square in both directions. Thus, while having speed (2,1), the hopper can change to speeds (1,0), (1,1), (1,2), (2,0), (2,1), (2,2), (3,0), (3,1) and (3,2). It is impossible for the hopper to obtain a velocity of 4 in either direction, so the x and y component will stay between -3 and 3 inclusive.
The goal of Hopping Race Tracks is to get from start to finish as quickly as possible (i.e. in the least number of hops), without landing on occupied squares. You are to write a program which, given a rectangular grid, a start point S, and a finish point F, determines the least number of hops in which you can get from S to F. The hopper starts with initial speed (0,0) and he does not care about his speed when he arrives at F.
2 5 5 4 0 4 4 1 1 4 2 3 3 3 0 0 2 2 2 1 1 0 2 0 2 1 1
Optimal solution takes 7 hops. No solution.