gregggut / magneticcave

Magnetic Cave

COMP 472/6721 Project Fall 2012 Due dates: October 22, 2012 + November 12, 2012 + November 26, 2012 + December 5, 2012 Late submission: 20% per day on each deliverable. No late submission accepted for the tournament. Teams: You can do the project individually or in teams of 2. Teams must submit only 1 copy of the project.

Purpose: The purpose of this project is to make you develop heuristics and state space search for a game, In this project, you will implement a 2-player game called Magnetic Cave. Magnetic Cave is a 2-player adversary game where each player tries to build a “bridge” of 5 magnetic bricks within a cave whose left and right walls are magnetic. For the sake of this project, the bricks of one player will be represented by a � and the bricks of the other by a �. The version of Magnetic Cave that you will implement will be played on a regular 8x8 chess board.

The rules of the game are simple:

• Initially, the cave (the board) is empty. Player � and player � move in an alternate fashion, starting with �. So � starts, followed by �, then � again, then � again, ...

• Because there are two big magnets on each side of the cave, a player can only place a brick on an empty cell of the cave provided that the brick is stacked directly on the left or right wall, or is stacked to the left or the right of another brick (of any color).

• As soon as one player is able to align 5 consecutive bricks in a row, in a column or in a diagonal, then this player wins the game.

• If no player is able to achieve a winning configuration and the board is full, then the game stops and there is a tie. The following figures show possible configurations of the game.

  A B C D E F G H 8 8 7 � � � � � 7 6 � 6 5 � � � � � 5 4 � � � 4 3 � � � � 3 2 � 2 1 � 1 A B C D E F G H Illegal configuration: Brick B6 cannot be placed there.

  A B C D E F G H 8 8 7 � � � � � � � 7 6 � 6 5 � � � � � � 5 4 � � � 4 3 � � � � 3 2 � � 2 1 � 1 A B C D E F G H Here, player � wins. He built a bridge from D7 to H7.

  A B C D E F G H 8 8 7 � � � � � � 7 6 � � � � 6 5 � � � � � � 5 4 � � � 4 3 � � � � 3 2 � � 2 1 � 1 A B C D E F G H Here, player � wins. He built a bridge from A3 to E7.

Your Task

In this project, you will implement a minimax algorithm to play this game automatically. You are free to develop the heuristic that you want, but your program must decide on the next move to take in at most 3 seconds (real time). In addition, you are also free to implement an alpha-beta search, as it may help you win the tournament (see below); however, no extra points will be given explicitly for the alpha-beta code. Play Modes

Your program should be able to run in manual mode and in automatic mode. This means that you should be able to run your program with:

1. manual entry for both �’s moves and �’s moves
2. manual entry for �’s moves & automatic moves for �
3. manual entry for �’s moves & automatic moves for � After each move, your program must display the new configuration of the board. Programming details -- To program the game, you can use Java, C or C++. If you wish to use another language, please check with me first. It is not necessary to have a fancy user-interface. A simple command-line interface is sufficient Tournament To make the project more fun, we will organize a tournament between all the projects submitted. 1 bonus point will be allocated to your result in this tournament. If, at anytime, your program takes more that 3 seconds to decide its next move, you will automatically be eliminated from the game, and your opponent will win.