Program 4: Gomoku Tournament

Results

• First Place: Cassie Reynolds and Ben Sauskojus. Here are their white.l and black.l entries.
• Second Place: Sheldon Ross and Russell Tempero.
• Third Place (Tie): William Hosbein and Chris Rossmith, David Wax and Ray Weber

Due Date

This assignment is due at the beginning of the lecture on Friday, December 7th. No late days can be used on this assignment, due to the fact that we will be holding a tournament among the programs in EPS 254 that day.

Partners

Everyone is required to complete this assignment with one partner. Submit one solution with both of your names on it.

Purpose

The purpose of this assignment is to give you experience incorporating AI game-playing techniques into a program that plays gomoku. The game will be played on a 15 by 15 board. In the event of a tie (see below), a tiebreaker will be played on an n by n board of undisclosed size.

Requirements

• The referee program for the tournament is driver.l. Notice that there are two missing functions in this file: white-get-move and black-get-move.
• Your white strategy should be implemented in a file named white.l. All functions in this file should be preceded with the prefix white-.
• Your black strategy should be implemented in a file named black.l. All functions in this file should be preceded with the prefix black-.
• The white-get-move and black-get-move functions should generally be able to return a move using 1 second or less of CPU time (Run time) .
• No cheating! I have tried to make the driver program fairly bullet proof, but in the event that I have overlooked something, please do not take advantage of any flaws.

The Tournament

The tournament will be held during the class period on Friday, December 7th in EPS 254. If your program is scheduled to play another team's program, you will play two games: once as the white player and once as the black player. The white player always moves first.

A game should proceed as follows:

1. Invoke clisp
2. Load the compiled version of the black player
3. Load the compiled version of the white player
4. Load the compiled version of the driver
5. Type (driver)

Write down the outcome of each game and how many moves this outcome took to reach. Report the outcome of each game to John. If one program makes an illegal play or consistently takes too long to move, the other program receives a forfeit and is declared the winner. Otherwise, one of three things can occur:

1. One player wins both games. In this case, the winner is clear.
2. Each player wins one game. In this case, whoever wins in fewer moves is the winner.
3. There is a tie. In this case, if time permits, you will be asked to play two more games with a different board size to see if a winner can be determined. If this still results in a tie, a tie will be declared.

What to Submit

The following materials must be received no later than Friday, December 7th at 12:00 noon.

1. A printout (not an e-mail) of the white.l file.
2. A printout (not an e-mail) of the black.l file, but only if this file uses a significantly different strategy than the white.l file.
3. An e-mail of the white.l and black.l files to John at paxton@cs.montana.edu

Grading

• 50%. Performance in the tournament.
• 30%. The quality of the strategy. At the top of the program, you should provide a high level overview comment that describes the strategy that is used by your program to play gomoku. If your program performs well, describing the strategy clearly and accurately will score full marks. Otherwise, I will look at the sophistication of the game playing techniques that you are using such as minimax, alpha-beta pruning, the evaluation function, etc.
• 10%. The quality of the solution. Does your solution use Common Lisp appropriately? Does the solution avoid duplicated code? Is the solution elegant? Is the solution easy to read and maintain? etc.
• 10%. The files compile with no errors and no warnings. The solution is commented appropriately.