1.0 Command Line Tic-Tac-Toe
The Curriculum for building redscience divides the task into Versions, of which Command Line Tic-Tac-Toe is the first. The following plan serves as an example of the kind of plan you can expect for other versions.
Much of the curriculum walks students through actually implementing parts of this plan. It is possible to skip to the action having never read the following higher-level plans that the software architecture is designed to fulfill (just like it is possible to modify open source code without knowing why it was built the way it was), but having a higher-level understanding of what you are working on can make you more productive as an innovator. Therefore, it is recommended that you read the following (abstract as it may be) before coding:
Requirements
(Various words are bolded in this first set of requirements to give a sense of what an ontology would have to include.)
Write a program that allows two humans (sharing the same keyboard) to play Tic-Tac-Toe at the command prompt, with options at any point to quit, to undo the last move, or to start a new game. Randomize the order of the players at the beginning of each new game. A player cannot attempt to place a piece from reserves to coordinates that the player knows are occupied. If a player has only one legal move, then choose it automatically (so the other player doesn’t have to wait). If a player has no legal move, automatically pass. Detect when a player repeats the exact same move facing the exact same board–this will be called “stalemate” and happens in Tic-Tac-Toe only when the board is full (so both players automatically pass). The stalemate rule determines the outcome if the final phase of a game ends in stalemate. Each game may also have one or more rules that are checked at the end of each turn (e.g. “First 3-same-color-in-a-row wins”).
The program should contain the following rules as a constant, and the rules should determine how play proceeds:
Played on hash (3,3)
2-Player
Assigned Colors
Circle: 5 black and 4 white start in reserve
First 3-same-color-in-a-row wins
Stalemate draws
In general, a game move is either a pass, a request to call it a draw, agreement/rejection of such a request, a jump from one spot to another, or a placement from reserves of a given shape and color to a spot on the board. The rules of Tic-Tac-Toe permit players to choose only moves of the last type and to only specify “to” coordinates, since all pieces in that player’s reserves will be of the same shape and color, but design your code to evolve support for other games (e.g. other-dimensional boards, other kind of pieces/cards, etc).
Acceptance Test Plan
Test that the program works. Confirm that it does not permit illegal moves, and that it recognizes draws and all kinds of wins (e.g. horizontal, vertical, upward-slanting-diagonal, and downward-slanting-diagonal). After finishing a game, confirm that you can roll back the choices using undo. Also confirm that you can end the game or restart at any time.
Potential Mockups
To start from command line:
pip install redscience
redscience tic-tac-toe
Each move adds a new section to the bottom…