[Tutor] Dots-And-Boxes

[Sean 'Shaleh' Perry]

On 02-Jun-2002 Kirby Urner wrote:
> 
>>\
>>"""Dots-and-Boxes is a familiar paper an pencil game for two players;
> 
> 
> Thanks for bringing this up Danny.  In earlier lives (as a
> younger guy), I played this game quite a bit on paper, with
> my sister Julie, peer group.  Taught it to a few people.
> Then I forgot about it completely -- until now.  I always
> called it "Square Off" and played it on graphing paper
> (grid paper).
> 
> Yes, having a GUI version w/ Python guts would be mucho fun
> and a challenging project.  I salute you for initiating this
> bold proposal, backed with original code.
> 

yeah, great one from childhood.

For the competition the design can be much simpler.

Have the player program read state from stdin and output moves to stdout.  A
mediator program can init to players and control the game.  Much like the
various net programming contests.

a sample session from the mediator's perspective would be:

(>> is output, <1 is player1 input, <2 is player2 input)
player 1 always goes first.

>1 init player1 as 1, grid 5x5
>2 init player2 as 2, grid 5x5
<1 move (0,0) (0,1)
>2 connect (0,), (0,1)
<2 move (5,0), (5,1)
1> connect (5,0), (5,1)
...
<1 move (3,2), (3,3) # this move makes a box and wins
>2 connect (3,2), (3,3)
>2 conceed
>> Player 1 wins, total .. out of ..