Description
Assignment Overview
Overview
OK, you know all about dots and boxes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dots_and_Boxes and you wrote the game playing elements and a random player to play the game. Now you want to write a much better player that should win the game.
Winning
How do you win the game? Can you always win the game. It turns out that d&b is a kind of game called a combinatorial game.
- there are two players moving alternately;
- there are no chance devices and both players have perfect information;
- the rules are such that the game must eventually end; and
- there are no draws, and the winner is determined by who moves last.
Because of this, it is possible to come up with a winning strategy.
Winning Player
You wrote a random player, now I want you to a winning player function called winning_play. You are going to pit winning_play against random_play (your old random player) and see who wins. The outcome should be obvious.
Rather than explain how to win, I would like you to look online and see if you can find a winning strategy. As a start, check out Elwyn Berlekamp’s (he wrote a book on dots-andboxes, no lie) youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KboGyIilP6k He lists some good strategies there. You can also find more such info.
Do as much as you can to create a winning player. You may not have time to “solve” the game but you should be able to do very well against a random player.
Main Program
You are going pit winning_play against random_play to play dots-and-boxes.
Your main program will operate in two modes:
- single play: there are two games here. o One with random_play first o One with winning_play
o Generate the two games in great detail in the file single_play.txt.
That exact name!
- multiple play: play a lot of games, (flip a coin who goes first) and see who wins statistically.
More detail
- prompt for a random seed integer
- prompt for a number of rounds the multi-player (shown below) will play
- in multiple play “flip a coin” to see who goes first and report it
- your program will play two rounds using winning_play and random_play players and report each individual play, stored in a file called
“single_play.txt” to be created in the executable’s directory.
- For each turn:
- draw the grid
- the score
- whose move it is
- what move was made
- was that a box just made, did they go again
- anything else that might be useful
- it then will play the provided number of rounds using a winning_play and a random_play players and report statistics of the results to a file called “multiple_play.txt”. The statistics to include are:
- the number of rounds played o average score overall and for each player o the median score overall and for each player o the highest and lowest score achieved for each player o anything else you think might be a good idea
Deliverables
As before, I want just one code file named “honors2.cpp” with everything in it. Makes it easier to grade. Handin will be to project13 named honors2.
One additional thing. I want a text file (no more than a page) that describes the strategy you implemented and how I can tell that it is working. You might want to embed in the single_play.txt file some info about when you used the strategy so it is clear to me.
Text file name should be strategy.txt Exactly that name!
Notes
- your winning_play statistics should be awesome, though not necessarily a clean sweep.
- as before, you should be able to play thousands of games in multiple play to get some good stats.
o if it takes minutes to do that, you need to rethink it.
