Dynamically created operators

Question

I created a program using dev-cpp and wxwidgets which solves a puzzle.
The user must fill the operations blocks and the results blocks, and the program will solve it.
Im solving it using bruteforce, i generate all non repeated 9 length number combinations using a recursive algorithm. It does it pretty fast.
Up to here all is great!
But the problem is when my program operates depending the character on the blocks. Its extremely slow (it never gets the answer), because of the chars comparation against +, -, *, etc. Im doing a CASE.
Is there some way or some programming language wich allows dinamic creation of operators? So i can define the operator ROW1COL2 to be a +, and the same way to all other operations.
I leave a screenshot of the app, so its easier to understand how the puzzle works.
http://www.imageshare.web.id/images/9gg5cev8vyokp8rhlot9.png


PD: The algorithm works, i tryed it with a trivial puzzle, and solved it in a second.

Answer 1

Not sure that this is really what you're looking for but..
Any Object Oriented language such as C++ or C# will allow you to create an "Operator" base class and then to derive from this base class a "PlusOperator" or "MinusOperator" etc'. this is the standard way to avoid such case statements.

However I am not sure this will solve your performance problem.
Using plain brute force for such a problem will result you in an exponential solution. this will seem to work fast for small input - say completing all the numbers. But if you want to complete the operations its a much larger problem with alot more possibilities.
So its likely that even without the CASE your program is not going to be able to solve it.

The right way to try to solve this kind of problems is using some advanced search methods which use some Heuristic function. See the A* (A-star) algorithm for example.

Good luck!

Answer 2

You can represent the numbers and operators as objects, so the parsing is done only once in the beginning of the solving.