OPI F2008: Object-Oriented Programming

Carsten Schürmann
Date: April 2, 2008

Project
Connect Four (Version 1.1)

Guidelines
While we acknowledge that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, you should nonetheless
strive for elegance in your code. Not every program which runs deserves full credit.
Make sure to state invariants in comments which are sometimes implicit in the informal
presentation of a class. Do not reinvent wheels, and try to make your methods small
and easy to understand. Use tasteful layout and avoid long winded and contorted code.
You are expected to work alone, but of course, you can discuss problems, solutions and
strategies with others.

Goal
The goal of this project is to implement the game Connect Four. The project is designed
as a four week project. You are asked to hand in two “homeworks”, which will be
graded. After you handed in your final implementation I will organize a Connect Four
competition, where your programs will play against one another. The winner will receive
a price.

Game Description
Connect Four is a two-player board game in which the players take turns in dropping
tokens into a vertical grid with the objective of getting four of one’s own tokens into a line.
The game was published by Milton Bradley in 1974; a non-proprietary version is known
as ”The Captain’s Mistress”. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connect_Four for
more information.
In the game, there are two colors of tokens. One player plays yellow, the other red.
The following depicts a game configurations that may occured in a concrete game.
 If we enumerate the columns with 0..6, we see that if yellow plays 2 and red plays 2,
red will have won, because red has managed to get four pieces into a line. This one is
diagonal, but it could also be horizontal or vertical.

Rules
1. The game board, has seven columns and six rows.
2. There are 21 red and 21 yellow tokens.

3. One player plays with red tokens, the other with yellow tokens.
4. The tokens are inserted at the top of a column, and they will fall down and land
on the ground (if the column was empty) or on top of a previously inserted token.
5. Red starts.

6. Red and yellow take turns.

7. One can only insert tokens in one of the seven columns.
8. One cannot insert a token into a column that is full.

9. A line consists of several tokens, either in vertical, horizontal, or diagonal form,

which contain only tokens of the same color.
10. A player wins if he or she manages to form a line of four tokens of his or her color.
11. The game ends if one of the player wins.

12. The game ends in a tie if none of the two players can make a valid move and none
of the players has won.
13. A move cannot take more than 18 seconds.
Project Goals
You are asked to implement two players for the Connect Four game and a graphical
user interface. A human player and an automatic player. We will provide you with
one interface that describes what a player is expected to do and you are supposed to
implement this interface. No more rules are given.
One of the most critical steps in this part of this project is to think of a good rep-
resentation of the game board. You are expected to design one that you consider most
appropriate for your player, i.e. you can quickly make decision about if you won or lost,
etc.. Then you are asked to implement an interface to the human player. We expect you
to implement a graphical user interface. For the second assignment you are expected to
hand in a program that allows two human players to play each other.
The automatic player is like a human player except that the computer uses an algo-
rithm to determine where to put one the next token. This could be a search algorithm,
just like the ones we discussed in class, depth first search, breadth first search, itera-
tive deepening, or maybe even αβ-pruning search. (This will likely be my choice for
my player!) We will not accept a player, that is based on the idea of randomly tossing
a token into one of the columns. You are required to implement some kind of search
algorithm.

Interfaces
Before telling you in detail what you have to do, we establish some common basic rules for
the implementation. First, the color red and yellow are represented by Boolean values,
where
red is represented as true
yellow is represented as false .

Every player you write, human or automatic, should implement the Player interface.
Your automatic player needs to have an internal representation of the board, otherwise
it will not be able to efficiently search for the best move. The human player doesn’t
do it, because we have memory, and are used to have the game situation in our heads.
But this also means, that the automatic player needs to be informed about the move of
the opponent. The human player observes that directly. Therefore, the Player interface
that we ask you to implement the following four methods.
public interface Player {
void init (Boolean color);
String name ();
int move ();
void inform (int i);
}
init is the method that the Game referee (implemented and administered by the
teaching staff) will use in order to inform a player about what color he/she/it is playing.
The method serves a player to identify himself or herself for the logs. The move method
is called when a player is asked to make a move, and the inform method is called to
inform the player about the move of the opponent.
Code
Please find the sample code on the webpage. Your directory tree should look something
like

. --- Player -- Player.java

|
- <yourname> -- <yourname>.java
Board.java
GUI.java
...

Where the yourname directory contains all of your code. Please substitute your name
for yourname. You need to import the player inferface with import Player.Player;.
It is important, that your classpath contains the root directory of that tree. (Denoted
here by .) If you have questions, on how to set this up, please ask the TAs.

Problem 1
Hand in your design of a board, with all methods that you think are necessary and
important. ’

Problem 2
Hand in your implemenation of the human player and the graphical user interface!

Problem 3
Hand in your automatic player in one file (containing all of the classes that you need to
run your automatic player) called <yourname>.java. The file should start with
/* Connect 4 */
/* My wonderful Connect4 Player implementation */

package <yourname>

import Player.Player;
....
Your file should provide a class called.

public class <yourname> implements Player {

...
}

For, example, my submission is called CarstenSchuermann.java providing the class

public class CarstenSchuermann implements Player {
...
}
Please follow these instructions carefully. Non-compliance will result in disqualifica-
tion.