CS 5510 Homework 4

Due: Friday, February 19th, 2010 9:40am

Part 1 – Clue Player Client

Create a program that acts as a Clue player by communicating with a TCP server at a given host and port number.

The protocol for the game is:

• After connection, send a newline-terminated sequence of characters that identifiers your player.
• Loop:
  • Receive a board state (as in HW 3) followed by a space and a player number, all on the same line. The player number provided by the server will be the same on every iteration.
  • Send back either roll or no-roll followed by a newline to indicate whether your player wants to roll or not.
  • Receive a roll number. If your player sent no-roll, the roll number will be 0.
  • Send back a destination as an open parenthesis, a number or an uppercase room letter, a space, another number or V, and a closing parenthesis followed by a newline.

For experimenting, you can use the server provided in server-1.zip. Run a server with n other randomly moving players at port number portno with

  mzscheme text-play.ss -p portno -n n

Alternately, run a version with a minimal GUI display using

  mred gui-play.ss -p portno -n n

If you run less than 6 players, then the server will wait for additional player clients.

The server will check whether a player's move is legal. If a player cannot move with a give dice roll, it must report back its current location as its move. The server requires a player to choose to roll if not rolling would force it to stay in place while rolling might let it move; similarly the server requires a player to choose not rolling if necessary to move.

Part 2 – Try to Win the Mini Game

The server provided in server-1.zip declares the first player to visit every room to be the winner.

Adjust your client player to try to win the mini game.

When you use text-play.ss or gui-play.ss, you can make some of the players sesinble using the -s flag followed by a number. A sensible automatic player chooses to not roll if that will get it to a new room, and it generally chooses to move into a new room if possible. It doesn't plan ahead by moving near rooms that it hasn't visited, though, so you should be able to beat it often.