Project 8

Due date: 3/10 @ noon

Objective: (1) to expand your horizons and (2) to modify the code base

Remember that you must work on this project with your new partner and the chosen code base.

Here is the final modification of the graph interface:


 abbey-regions ;; -> Listof[(list Follower Number)]
 ;; compute which follower gets how many points 
 ;; for incomplete abbey regions
 ;; ASSUME: for each (f,n) on the resulting list: 
 ;; 0 < n < 9 [the max score you can get for an abbey]

Using this method, the administrator can implement the end-of-game scoring functionality.

Task 1a: Modify your code base to implement this new method. [POINTS: 5]

Task 1b: Make sure your program can now run complete games with up to six instances of your player. Randomize your player in how it selects the next tile to place and where/whether to place a follower during a turn. You should should now be able to observe non-trivial outcomes. [POINTS: 5]

Background: Some 12 years ago, Christa Lopes (a PhD student then) and Karl Lieberherr (on the faculty here) came up with a new idea for controlling the interactions between different parts of a program. At Xerox Parc, where Christa did an internship with Gregor Kiczales, the idea evolved into a new programming paradigm: aspect-oriented programming. His team then created AspectJ, a dialect of Java. This new language has gained tremendous industry attention over the past six years and, for better or worse, you should know about the basic ideas and what researchers now think about it. Your boss may confront you with this idea one day.

Task 2: In the spirit of the Pragmatic Programmer, you will do something for yourself this week. On Tuesday (March 8), you will attend two of the four talks in the joint Northeastern-Brown symposium (see blog for details). For your homework, you will write two short memos, one per talk. Each memo should specify a from, to, and subject line. The body of the memo must contain at most 100 words.

Each of you should write one memo. Then switch the memos and play editor for your partner. Go through at least two editing cycles. Ideally, leave one night in between. [POINTS: 20 (up to 10 per essay)]

Note: We will score your essays with 6 points for "syntactic correctness" and 4 point for "content". The former includes spelling, sentence-level construction, paragraph-level connections, and thesis statements. The latter is a check whether you understood the basic idea of the chosen talk.

Product: Mail a tar bundle with three subdirectories labeled YourName_Project, YourName_Memo1 and YourName_Memo2. The first subdirectory must contain all your project files both code and documentation. Place all versions of the memos into the two directories. Label the final one in each directory final.txt. Make sure it is plain text (no pdf, no doc, no postscript, etc).