3 — The State 🔗 ℹ

Due Thursday, 05 October 2023, 11:59:59pm

Partnership Evals For this milestone, we request an evaluation of your partnership.

Delivery Place the product of this week’s milestone into your git repo as follows:

Programming Task Design & implement a data representation for the referee’s game states. This game state comprises two three essential pieces of knowledge: the current state of the map, the state the players’s states, and the order in which the players take turns. The active player is the player whose turn it is.

Also design & implement a data representation for information about all players that a referee may wish to share with the active player.

Design Task In contrast to human players, AI players are not in charge; the referee of the game framework is and it plays the role of arbiter, which is often left to the collective of all players (or a subset of knowledgeable ones).

Here the referee engages the players, informing them of the game’s progress as needed, and managing turns. When granted a turn, a player responds with a description of the desired action, but it is the referee that executes them on behalf of the player on the ground-truth state of affairs—if the request is legal.

Design a player interface in the form of a method/function wish list. For each piece of functionality, describe what knowledge it must be able to retrieve from context (if any). Choose the wish list format that you got to know in Fundamentals I and Fundamentals II, depending on which of the languages used in these courses matches your chosen language most closely.

Note, each player component consists of two pieces: the mechanics for executing game actions and a strategy (or several strategies) for pursuing a goal. This task is concerned with mechanics only.

The memo should not exceed a page.

Keep in mind our Q.Com, a Plan while you work on a design task.

Testing Task Create a test harness named xmap. The harness consumes its JSON inputs from STDIN and sends its results to STDOUT. Create three tests and place them in the specified Tests/ folder.

A test case always consists of given inputs and expected outputs. For this course, a test consists of a pair of files: n-in.json, the input file, and n-out.json, the expected output file, where n is an integer between 0 and the requested number of tests (exclusive).—Constraint No test file may exceed the size limit of 40Kb.

The inputs of xmap consist of two JSON values: a JMap object followed by a JTile.

The expected outputs is an array of JCoordinates, sorted in row-column order, listing all JCoordinates where this tile could be added to the given JMap.

Sorted in row-column order Two coordinates c1 and c2 are in row-column order if either the row index of c1 is strictly less than the row index of c2 or, the two row indices are equal and the column index of c1 is strictly less than the column index of c2.

[Entirely Optional but Helpful Your instructors found it extremely helpful to have graphical rendering functions for maps around to formulate test cases.]

Well-formed and Valid You may assume that all inputs to your test harnesses from STDIN are well-formed and valid. A well-formed piece of JSON satisfies the grammar; such a piece is valid if it also satisfies all the side constraints of a schema specification.

Beyond integeration testing, we should eventually move to stress testing. The course will touch on this idea in November or December.

Pedagogy Besides unit tests, multi-component projects also need integration tests. Such tests compose several components and run tests on the composite that exercise functions across the components. This task is a lightweight illustration of this idea.

When a milestone assignment requests an integration test harnesses, you should not have to modify the core functionality from the previous milestone—other than the addition of code for (de)serialization between your chosen data representation and JSON; see Q.Com, a Plan.

That is, building harnesses for integration tests doesn’t slow you down—it actually accelerates your progress because the goals are always compatible with the current task and lay its foundation. Work thru the integration testing task before tackling the programming task.

Partner Evaluation

Only the head TA and, if necessary, the instructors will read your responses; nobody else will. At their digression, the instructors may interview partners.

The partnership evaluation is worth 10 points.