Course Project

(preliminary version)

By the end of this course you will complete and hand in a programming project, worth 15% of your grade. Start early. Hand in during the finals week.

You have considerable freedom in the choice of your project. I have to approve your choice, though. Alternatively, you can pick one of my suggested projects from the list below.

You can use either the Metrowerks CodeWarrior (Mac lab), Visual C++ 5, or a UNIX compiler (gcc, g++, probably in conjunction with Tcl/Tk library if you want to do graphics). The point is that I must be able to run your program to grade it.

The possible projects are as follows:

Mathematical projects (little or no graphics)

Write a class BigInteger for handling integers of arbitrary size (with built-in int you cannot have more than 4 billion). You will need to allocate memory dynamically and create/copy/destroy your objects correctly. Overloading arithmetic operator would be nice. Test: compute 100! = 1*2*3*...*99*100 .
The same for floating point numbers of arbitrary precision. Again, you will have to allocate memory dynamically. Test: compute the first 100 decimal digits of Pi. The value of Pi can be found by summing various infinite series (the more terms you take, the better the resulting approximation of Pi) One of the simplest known series for Pi is

1 - 1/3 + 1/5 -1/7 + 1/9 - ... = Pi/4

Unfortunately, this particular series converges very slowly. There are much faster converging series, one of which I'll give you if you choose this project.

Games (graphics and simple logic)

Here I want you to implement the graphics interface for a game. For a board game, you classes should

store the position on the board,
draw and re-draw the board,
offer public methods through which another programmer will communicate a proposed move,
check every move for correctness (i.e. compliance with the rules of your game),
detect whether the game comes to an end with that move (a player wins, or no more moves are possible).

Your code should be written with the view towards the possibility that another programmer will write a logic module for your game, and integrate it with your graphics front-end.

So far I could think of:

Battleship (I may write the logic module).
Black Box (for the games itself, as well as its description and rules, go to a UNIX system, start emacs, and give the command ESC+X (the cursor goes to the "minibuffer", a single line at the bottom of the screen) blackbox. Here is a copy of black box documentation from Emacs.
Othello (aka Reversi)
You can play this game at
- http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Valley/5173/Javello.htm (this seems to be is the best-playing Java implementation on the 'web -- at least, I lost to it three times in a row). That page lists the links to almost all other interesting implementations.
- http://www.ability.org.uk/othello.html (it's a less sophisticated program, I expect your program to be more like it).
- Yahoo games : Reversi (search Yahoo.)
I also found a collection of simple Java games with source code. That page may give you an idea of what you want to do: http://www.ability.org.uk/ongames.html