MP3: ConnectN

Use this GitHub Classroom invitation link to fork your copy of MP3. Once your repository has been created, import it into IntelliJ following our assignment Git workflow guide.

At this point you should be familiar with the requirements from previous MPs. See the grading description below.

To experiment with the web interface, do the following:

At first, nothing will work because you have not implemented any of the required game transformation functions yet.

As far as browser support, we have confirmed that Chrome works. Other browsers may or may not—but Chrome definitely does.

To complete MP3 you must understand the specification. That’s your starting point, and your returning point when you get confused.

Writing code to a specification is an important skill to learn. In many software companies, designing code and implementing it are not always done by the same group. A project manager or program manager may write a specification, which is provided to developers to implement. Or a team of developers may come up with a specification, and then divide up the implementation work between them.

Regardless of where it comes from, writing code in groups almost always requires a specification to be successful—unlike when you do independent projects and can make up things as you go. A lot of the design work and high-level decisions end up going in to the specification, so by the time the implementation begins the hard and interesting choices have been made. That’s not to say it still isn’t fun at that point—even developing to a spec provides huge opportunities for simultaneous creativity and correctness in that unique programming way.

MP3 requires you to implement some simple getters and setters (just return or change the variable), and some ones with more complicated behavior. Be sure to read the documentation carefully.

You will need to do a bit of work to implement the game board. ConnectN is a Connect-4-like game. Tiles fall in the top (large Y values) and sit at the bottom. Just to confuse you a bit, we’ve reversed the coordinates from last week. So we’re now in the proper first quadrant of 2D space, with X values going left to right and Y values going down to up:

A ConnectN game ends when either player plays N consecutive tiles in either a single row or column 1. Tiles always have to be played at the lowest possible location in each column—in a real Connect-4 board they fall downward and rest on the tiles below them. Consult the Wikipedia page for more details.

Classes can define methods and variables that are not attached to instances. See Player.java for an example of a class variable used to provide each instance with a unique ID. You’ll need to implement some of these for ConnectN.java.

Be careful about varying definitions of equality. You’ll need to implement ConnectN.equals, but its definition of equality is quite strict. On the other hand, the class comparison methods use a different definition of equality. Passing all of the tests requires distinguishing between the two and implementing each correctly.

The course staff is ready and willing to help you every step of the way! Please come to office hours, or post on the forum when you need help. You should also feel free to help each other, as long as you do not violate the academic integrity requirements.

As in previous MPs, we have provided exhaustive test cases for each part of MP3. Please review the MP0 testing instructions.

Like MP0 and MP1, we have provided you with an autograding script that you can use to estimate your current grade as often as you want. Please review the MP0 autograding instructions.