ConnectFour

A competition to find the ultimate bot to beat Connect Four.

Instructions

You will be given a time limit (somewhere around 1 1/2 hours) to create the best bot that you can to play Connect Four.

• Find a friend or two with whom to pair program.
• Fork the repo:
  • https://github.com/alanvoss/connect_four
• try out an example match
  • > bin/match PureRandomness PureRandomness
• create a contender (<project_root>/lib/connect_four/contenders)
  • take a look at PureRandomness for some ideas
  • it needs to be a GenServer that responds to:
    • call :name: (return your team name)
    • call {:move, board} (return the column from 0-6 in which you'd like to play on this turn)
  • utilize the BoardHelper (and refer to the tests) for several functions that simplify some common tasks
    • board evaluation
    • board creation
    • piece at given coordinate
    • "what would the board look like if I dropped my piece in this column?"
    • etc.
  • your GenServer can choose to store state if if wishes, but the full board will be passed each time.
  • the board is a matrix of a List of 6 Lists, 7 integers each (7 across, 6 down):
    • 0 is an empty, eligible space / column
    • 1 is where you've moved previously
    • 2 is where your opponent has moved
  • make sure to run tests
    • > mix test
    • if tests fail against your repo, you will be disqualified
  • test your bot against PureRandomness. if you can't beat it 100% of the time...
    • > bin/match PureRandomness YourBotModuleName
    • the result map for the match will be displayed immediately following the winner announcement
      • this should help you with troubleshooting
      • you can visualize this result by:
        • > iex -S mix
        • iex> ConnectFour.Controller.display_game(result, true)
    • alternatively, you can start a battle (see below) and then display with "Watch the Battle" (see below)
  • your GenServer should respond to all calls within 5 seconds. If not, you forfeit.
    • you are allowed to do as much background processessing as you want between calls.
    • you are allowed to spin up other processes.
    • the lifecyle of your bot will be around 10 seconds.
      • no supervisor will keep it alive (if your GenServer dies, tough luck)
      • it will be started each time a match with your (new) opponent begins
  • if you make a disallowed move (a column that is already full or out of bounds), you also forfeit.
• run tests again, just to be sure
  • > mix test
• create a pull request against the original repo's elixirconf2017 branch
  • https://github.com/alanvoss/connect_four
• we'll run a tournament with all the contenders to find the ultimate winner.
  • run yourself to get a log of games played
  • > bin/battle

Results

• results will be available for download in this folder:

  http://bit.ly/2eWQOLf

Watch the battle

• if you copy the above "Results" folder contents into your cloned repo's results/ folder
  • > bin/display_games