Scratch

Hardmath123 wrote:

Actually, amcerbu, that means you agree with blob.

Well, I did quote you agreeing with me — maybe amcerbu was referring to that? 

Hardmath123 wrote:

Hexagons. What do you think?

Nice! Doesn't look quite regular, but I'm sure you can tweak it a little. You are completely insane using CSS, though. 

Hardmath123 wrote:

I don't see why you need board_size (you have the actual board to find that out yourself, right?).

amcerbu wrote:

I firmly believe that field size should be a property that can be changed, and that isn't implementation-specific (size becomes another one of the variables "fed" to AI code).  A perfect AI should be able to play on a field of any size.

Hardmath123 wrote:

Nah, I think that's over-complicating. Same for the board size; let's stick with one value.

Amcerbu's right: you're going to have a board_size variable in your JS anyway, so it might as well be tweakable. And sending it along with every request just means I don't have to sqrt(len(board)).

We probably should implement the pie rule, too. It shouldn't be too difficult — and now we have an AI class we can just add new functions to it.

That's a good point — I can just flip the board on the Python end, since it's only needed for the AIs. Done!

Revised protocol:

/ai/getmove
  * board_size = 17 (or whatever)
  * board = "0R00000BB00BRR..."
  * AI = "blob8108"
  * alternate_player = 0 (or 1)
returns JSON:
  { x: 5,
    y: 7,
    time_taken: 3.393709897994995 }

Can we start coding now? 

Last edited by blob8108 (2012-11-14 03:25:35)

Hardmath123 wrote:

What's alternate_player?

How I know whether to flip the board or not. Call it player = "red" (or "blue") if you like.

So, the interface:

GET /ais
  => list of AIs: [{'name': 'blob8108'}, ...]

POST /ais/blob8108/move
  => get move {'x': 1, 'y': 2, 'time_taken' etc} (discussed earlier)

POST /ais/blob8108/pie_rule
  => returns {'swap': 1} (0 otherwise)

Slightly revised base class:

class BaseAI(object):
    name = "Hardmath123"

    def pie_rule(self, board):
        """Pie rule decision making: return true to agree to swap; false to keep playing."""
        return False

    def move(self, board):
        """Return a tuple of (X,Y) containing where you move."""
        return (5, 7)

It is OK if I go crazy with HTML5 and not really care about IE? I'll try to support FF and Webkit, since anyone smart enough to be doing this competition is clearly above IE.

Crazy HTML5 is cool. I'm sure IE9 will kinda-sorta work anyway. *facepalm* Oh, wait, you're using weird hacky CSS... 

Anyway, let's start coding. Gentlemen, start your Xcodes! 

Great! Although I object to "Xcodes". Let's not discriminate here... 

Last edited by blob8108 (2012-11-14 14:10:18)

nXIII wrote:

Regular! (I was bored  )

Woop! 

nXIII wrote:

Regular! (I was bored  )

Showoff. 

Well...

I got the menu working, you can now pick who plays as black or white. There's also a field for board size. When you click the next button a really sweet CSS 3D flip ( ) happens and you have a new game board.

What is the largest board size you want to support? I'm having sizing issues with CSS. Maybe just have two options, SMALL and BIG? I'd like the hexagons to be centered and X-axis-rotated a few degrees for a cool perspective look, but that goes crazy if I have more than 15 hexagons — can we make that an upper limit? 

How's the Python going? I was wondering if you could implement a timeout after 15 seconds which automatically returned (-1,-1). I don't know how one would do that though. 

Great, that's a lot more progress than I've managed. 

My actual life has suddenly started getting too busy for my liking; so I'm not getting much coding time. 

Cool. Good luck! 

Thanks, both of you! 

amcerbu wrote:

Cambridge, England, or Cambridge, Massachusetts?

Good question! The one in England (I live in the UK). Although my friend did try and convince me to apply to MIT... 

Great! I still need to debug a bit and make a few tweaks (my hexagons are currently squares), and add win detection. But overall it's working out well. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy the server-integration was (I wrote a simple server to make me input the "ai" results manually for testing). 

Pushed. 

Well, it works pretty well. Now I need to get my JS working right and we're ready to roll!

Mind explaining how to use the base AI class (and get it on the server) here for all participants? 

Last edited by Hardmath123 (2012-11-28 06:04:33)

No.

Here, I updated it to add AI loading. Each AI lives in its own module.

To create an AI: Copy _template.py to a new file (<username>.py, inside the "ais" folder), and fill in the "move" and "will_swap" functions.

You can define your own helper functions in the file, too: the loader will just ignore them. (You might want to share code between "move" and "will_swap", for example, using a third function.)

The provided "board" is a hex.Board object (defined here). Useful stuff:
  indexing:  board[x][y]
  get size:  board.size
  copying:  board.copy()

(You'll probably want to copy it if you're using some kind of recursive algorithm to analyse moves, for example.)

@Hardmath123: Can you send me the JS code now?    Oh, and should we update the first post?

Last edited by blob8108 (2012-11-28 14:21:43)