Contents

• Assignment Overview
• Setup
• Rules
• Constraints
• Text Commands
• The Usual Warnings, Hints and Details - Read them All
• Pre-submission Test and Submission
• Marking

Cmput 455 Assignment 4

Due Dec 2, 11:55pm. Submit via eClass submission link on the main eClass course page.
Late submission (with 20% deduction) Dec 4, 11:55pm. Submit via separate eClass link for late submissions.

In this assignment, you develop your own player for Binary Game. You can implement any player you want using any techniques, as long as it's in Python 3 and follows the rules and constraints below. We will test the performance of your player in two tournaments.

• In the marking tournament, for regular assignment marks, we will match your player against a fixed set of our Binary Game players.
• The championship tournament, for bonus points and glory, will be a tournament among student programs. The winning team will be crowned the Fall 2024 Cmput 455 Binary Game champions.

Setup

1. First, as in previous assignments, make sure you have your Python 3 and NumPy set up. You can review the procedures under Lecture 3 activities.
2. Download assignment4.tgz and expand it. The directory assignment4 contains:
   • Starter code a4.py for your player, similar to previous starter codes.
   • A script a4test.py for testing your code on the public tests.
   • Code for two of the four opponents for the marking tournament: random_player.py, and a simple boolean minimax-based player minimax_player.py.
   • We will not publish the other two opponents before the tournament, but here is a little bit of information about them. One will be MCTS-based, and the other will be a stronger minimax-based player. We will tune the strength of these two players such that they will be a little bit stronger than the public players, but perfectly possible to defeat within the scope of an assignment.
3. Add the code to implement your solution in assignment4. Your main program must remain in a4.py.

Rules

• Games will be played on a rectangular board of size 5x5 or more. We may setup a board position using play commands before we ask the players to generate their moves.
• The time limit will be 30 seconds per move. If a program does not play within the time limit, it will be killed by the script and instantly loses the game. Leave a margin of safety and use a bit less than 30 seconds.
• The memory limit will be 1 Gigabyte per program.
• If a program generates an illegal move, it instantly loses the game.
• If a program crashes or exceeds the memory limit, it instantly loses the game.
• If a game is interrupted for other reasons, it may be replayed at the decision of the instructor.
• Your player is allowed but not required to resign.
• Your player will not be called to generate a move after the game is over.

Constraints

• You can use any code provided by us, or created by you as part of this course, but no other outside sources of code. Using standard python libraries is OK, before using other more exotic libraries ask on the eClass forum.
• Your program is not allowed to use more than one thread for computation/search.
• Your program is not allowed to use programming languages other than Python 3.
• Your program is allowed to read/write files within your assignment4 directory only.
• The total file size of the assignment submission, including all files, is limited to 1 Megabyte uncompressed. It must remain under that limit while your program is running, i.e. your program cannot generate files of larger total size.
• Further reasonable constraints to prevent abuse may be imposed as we become aware of them.

Text Commands

• genmove
  x y num
  = 1
  

  Your genmove command should generate a move using your player, and comply with the rules and constraints above.
• The functionality of all other existing text commands such as play should be left as-is. If you do change the implementation, make sure that they still work as expected.

The Usual Warnings, Hints and Details - Read them All

• Please make sure that these details are correct in your assignment 4 submission.
• Your file must be a valid tgz file named assignment4.tgz which can be uncompressed with tar xvfz assignment4.tgz
• Name your main file a4.py .
• You may add extra python files within the same directory.
• Do not introduce extra levels of directories.
• By default, we assume that teams will stay the same as in assignment 3. If you change your team, submit the new information using the web form by Nov 25. (If your team changes later, use the web form anyway.)

Pre-submission Test and Submission

Run the public tests as follows:

python3 a4test.py a4.py assignment4-public-tests.txt

Follow the same general steps as in assignment 1 to create your presubmission.log file and your submission, but (of course) using your assignment4 directory and assignment4.tgz as file name. Add both your presubmission.log and readme.txt to your assignment4 directory.

Marking

There will be 5+2 marks for this assignment.

• 1 mark for your file presubmission.log which shows the log of your correct test execution and your readme.txt file.
• 4x1 mark for your wins against our 4 test opponents. We will play at least two games against each opponent, one with each player going first. We might play more games depending on available machines and time.
• Up to 2 bonus marks for doing well in the championship tournament. Typically, the top 8 teams receive some bonus marks, and the two finalists receive two marks.

Last modified: Nov 2, 2024 by Martin Müller