Hello CS 4341 A22!
Below is information about using the Referee we are providing for project 2.
This is the referee program for the Ultimate Tic Tac Toe (UTTT) AI for Project 2. The details of how your programs need to communicate with the referee are on Canvas.
The referee has two dependencies, numpy and pygame. Please install these with
pip install numpy and python3 -m pip install -U pygame --user.
If there are issues with installing, please refer to
the official documentation for the libraries.
I can guarantee this program will work for Python 3.9 and up.
Please check that are you using a valid version of python.
You can check your version with python --version and/or python3 --version.
You may need to use python or python3 or even python3.9
to properly run the program depending on how your system handled Python and if you are using an IDE.
I will use python in the README for simplicity.
Once python and dependencies are sorted, you can run the referee with
python referee.py <Player 1 name> <Player 2 name> --time_limit <time limit>
The Player 1 and 2 names are single word names for each of the agents.
--time_limit is an optional argument that allows you to specify the time limit to play (in seconds).
It defaults to 10 seconds. We will use 10 seconds in the competition.
This argument option is provide to allow easier debugging.
The referee will create the files that it maintains in the same directory that the referee.py file is in.
If you would like to just play the game, run
python game.py <Player 1 name> <Player 2 name>
and then you can play using the UI.
You should not need to modify any of the code provided to you. You are to write your owm program that can communicate with this referee.
Honestly, I fully expect there to be bugs in this code. If you for any reason suspect that
the referee is not behaving as described in the assignment on Canvas, please let us know in
the project-2-referee-bugs channel in Slack.
The first version of the referee did not produce a end_game file like it should. This version fixes that issue and updates the output messages to match the ones in Canvas.
The previous version of the referee did not filter out invalid initial moves. This version fixes that issue so the same move cannot be made twice.
The previous version of the referee used 'X' and 'O' in the first four moves file to indicate player moves; this is confusing because who is 'X' and who is 'O' is randomly chosen and is not communicated to the players directly. To make communication easier for the players, the referee now uses the player names in the first_four_moves file.
The clean() function seems to not work well on the previous versions of the referee. This update fixes the clean function and modifies the referee to clean up its files when the game is over.
The clean() function has been update again to be cross-platform and work on different python versions. The default screen size is smaller. The referee now handles incorrectly formatted moves more gracefully.
The referee now creates both .go files at the end of the game, as described in canvas.
That is all! Have fun playing UTTT and finding fun ways to break my code...
Will Babincsak