Assignment 4 information

• October 15: Well, better late than never? Based on a student's question from Friday, we will put up an oracle for problem 4c which will run my ab-minimax with your evaluation function and will print out the board and other information at each level of the minimax search. (UPDATE: the oracle should be up sometime Monday evening)

• October 13: Oh, and one more thing --- we've increased the number of attempts allowed to 4. The fourth attempt (like the third) is discounted 5%, and we'll take the maximum of your attempts (after the discount for attempts 3 and 4).

• October 13: As announced in (the second half of) class today, the automatic (if you signed up for it in class) extension to 5pm is now extended to midnight tonight. The usual first tier late penaly deadline has been extended from midnight Saturday night to 5pm Sunday (October 15).

  This extension is for the electronic part only!!! The written part is still due today at 10am/5pm because you won't be able to turn in hardcopy after hours. The first tier late deadline for the written part is Monday at 10am. You can drop it off at the CS main office in Lally 207.

• October 13: I will put up another oracle, this one for Problem 3c. It will run a version of my alpha-beta minimax using your evaluation function on a given board and will print out lots the board at each node. I'll get this oracle put together this afternoon, but it be a little while until Adam gets it up on the web.

• October 12: updated the assignment 4 tips page to clarify some points under the "Evaluation function convention" section (now renamed to the "Evaluation function (and ab-minimax) conventions" section).

• October 11: updated the assignment 4 tips page and the guide to assignment 4 support code to reflect that a "move" is an integer between 1 and 7 inclusive that indicates which column you want to play in. The player function returned by your create-ab-minimax-player function must return a valid move.

• Some tips for Assignment 4 (including an important clarification/correction.

• Software updates:
  • late Saturday October 7: a minor update (play-c4 prints the wrong message when you have a draw)
  • Friday October 6: The connect4.scm and a4code.com files have been updated to fix the following bugs:
    • Giving play-c4 the optional third argument #t caused an error.
    • The open-diagonals function had an error in it.
  You can get the most recent versions from the links below.

• Example of using the board analysis function in connect4.scm

• The Web Graders/Oracles page is up!

• Here are some links to sites where you can play connect 4:
  • www.jgames.com/connectfour/
  • www.theebest.com/games/connect4/connect4.htm
  • www.freefungames.com/applets/connectfour/ You can specify minimax search with or without alpha-beta pruning and the depth limit for this one.

• The Guide to Assignment 4 support code is now up. Please see this page for documentation on the support code.

• The files you will need for this assignment are:
  • Compiled support code for Nim, Coin-strip, and Connect 4.

    This is compiled under MIT Scheme 7.5 for Intel x86 hardware. I hope to provide a file for using with version 7.3 on Sun hardware.

  • Support code (source) for Connect 4