CSCI 503-1 Computer Assignment 4 Spring 2020 (20 points)
Tic-tac-toe is a game for two players, X and O, who take turns marking the spaces in a 3 x 3 grid. The player who succeeds in placing three of their marks in a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal row is a winner. Write a python program to simulate playing this game. Draw the grid on your terminal screen and display your marks on the grid. You need to import the graphics package into your program, download and install the Xming program (from the Internet) to your computer to activate the graphics package. If you’re using PuTTY to access the tiger machine, you need to enable X11 forwarding, but if you’re directly using the ssh to access the tiger, you need to use the ssh with –X option. One of the players starts playing the game who is randomly chosen between the two players. You can play the game for as many times as you wish, but for a final test, do it for 12 consecutive games. To start your program, follow the example on page 100 of the textbook. To simulate a game, you can use a random number generator (RNG), randrange ( ), importing from the random package, and to get the same sequence of random numbers for each time to execute the program, set the seed value to 1 in your main ( ) routine. The functions described below are just suggestions. You can design your program anyway you like but make it sure that it generates the correct results.
• def main ( ): For each new play, to create a window on the terminal screen for a given size, say 400 x 400 pixels, it calls the function draw_board ( ) that draws a 3 x 3 grid on the screen. It prints the game number and calls the function init_play ( ) to choose the player who makes the first move. To simulate of playing a game, it calls the function play ( ), which returns the identity of the winner or returns None if the game is a draw and updates the number of wins for the winner. After each game, it pauses for the user input to continue to the next game, waiting for the user to enter a “yes” and closes the window for a fresh start. If the user prompt is a “no”, it quits playing the games and calls the function print_stat ( ) to print out the final winning scores.
• def draw_board ( win ): In addition to drawing horizonal and vertical lines on the grid, this function also prints the corresponding index values from 0 to 8 in the 9 cells of the grid, where the index value of leftmost of the first row of the grid has assigned to 0 and the index value of rightmost of the last row of the grid has assigned to 8, and the index values increases from left to right and from bottom to top. The argument win refers to the object of the window drawn on the screen.
• def init_play ( win ): It calls the RNG to choose the first and second player (like a tossing a coin), where the first player will start the game, and it returns the index values of the two players to the main ( ) routine.
• def play ( win, players ): It simulates a single game by alternating between two
players for each step. A game is over when a player ends up of marking three
Tic-Tac-Toe
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horizontal, vertical, or diagonal cells on the grid; or it’s over when all 9 cells are marked on the grid. For each move, a cell number between 0 to 8 is chosen by the RNG. However, if the cell is chosen before, it calls the RNG to get another cell. The player with index value 0 uses the letter X and the player with index value 1 uses a circle, and places it in the center of the chosen cell. If a player wins a game, then the routine returns the identity of the player to the main ( ) routine, but if the game is a draw, then it returns the value None. After a player makes 3 or more moves in a game, it calls the function after_3_steps ( ) to determine if the player is a winner, and if it’s, it terminates the game.
• def after_3_steps ( n, cell, player): It determines if player is a winner, where n is the
number of moves made by the player and cell is the cell numbers for those n >= 3 moves. To figure out if combinations of 3 out of n cells results a winning: they are located on the same horizontal, vertical, or diagonal positions, it calls the function check_win ( ) for each possible combination: for n = 3, there is only 1 combination, for n = 4, there are 3 combinations, and for n =5, there are 6 combinations. If any one of the possible combinations shows a winning, then it prints the player as a winner and returns the identity of the player to the calling function; otherwise, it returns None.