It is time for some action. This section is organized in the following manner—you will learn some techniques to optimize the code and speedup the application. These techniques will be directly applied to improve the performance of the Gold Hunt game.
This is the first part of the optimization task. Here, the performance will be improved in three steps. We will call these optimization pass one, pass two, and pass three. After implementing each of these strategies, the code will be re-profiled to get an understanding of the speedup accomplished. Let's get started with optimization pass one.
The profiling output (refer to the Profiling the initial code section) shows the find_distance method as the bottleneck. As a starter, let's make some changes to this algorithm so that it runs faster. Here is the original method that was presented in the Reviewing the initial code section in Chapter 7, Performance – Identifying Bottlenecks...
