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Senior Project: Quoridor Team Phase One

Started by pieomon, 2006-03-21T12:25:34-06:00 (Tuesday)

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pieomon

This is Christopher D. Cobb of the Quoridor team.  We're working on making a computerized version of the game of Quoridor, a game where players move their pawns across a board while using walls to block each other off.  We are currently in phase one of this project, which has up to four players playing against each other on the same computer.  The link is available here

http://www.cs.siue.edu/SeniorProjects/2005/fall/QuoridorTeam/CAOSTest/index.html

If anyone has any feedbacks please contact me at thepieomon@aol.com or you can post a reply here, as I'll check this thread.


[edit]
Thanks for everyone who posted feedback, it really helped out a lot.

EvilAndrew

I have an interface suggestion.  

When the mouse is floating over the squares that you cannot move your "dot" into or on the intersections of two possible wall segments, you should show still allow the user to click to create a new wall.  

I understand that you would have to guess which wall the user wants in some cases, but you could use curser-proximity and your existing "show me what wall I will place when I click" feature to be sure that the user places the intended wall.  At this time, it is distracting and sometimes a little frustrating when you move the mouse and the wall disappears.
......

Jerry

I get an error when I attempt to run it: "Application failed to initialize properly" :-?

What are the requirement specs?
   
"Make a Little Bird House in Your Soul" - TMBG...

Ross Mead

The interface isn't too bad at all.  I agree with Andrew's comment.  As I was impatient and did not read the rules, I spent some time trying to figure out why I couldn't attach walls, as one would untuitively think you could.  The hover-overs would pop up sometimes, but not others.  It took a few seconds to figure out that I was actually hovering over invalid spots.  Basically, I'm just saying that you may want to make visible the abilites and limitations of the player, accounting for the guy who doesn't read the rules... like me... :-P

On a side note, I think this game could make for some interesting and complicated AI.  I'm sure that if someone had something like, oh, say, a Connect 4 playing AI, that they could extend its functionality to work in the realm of this game...

(I think only Chris would get that last remark... good luck buddy! :-P )

Jerry

Not bad - here's a few observations:

1. The black text against the grey backgound is difficult to read.

2. The small font of "wall" is difficult to read.

3. If a player has yet to move off of their goal, the marker apears over the middle of the word "GOAL".

4. When a marker gets to the opposite side of the field, it was not clear that I had to move the marker onto the Goal in order to win the game. The first time I played I thought I could only move into the squares marked as valid moves.

5. When a game is over and "new game" is chosen it sends you to the start menu. I know that this is easy, but it should just send you to a game board with the same user settings. This is the most likely event to happen, but if someone wants to change the game settings you could have a menu item under options.

6. What about some game stats? Wins/losses maybe.

7. And I agree with Evil Andrew's point about walls.
"Make a Little Bird House in Your Soul" - TMBG...

pieomon

My Connect 4 AI can't beat anyone except people and AI who play specificaly to lose, and besides, Quoridor's branching factor (around 100 per ply) makes it impossible to write an alpha-beta search AI for.

As for system requirements, do you have Visial Studio .NET framework installed?  I don't believe it will work without it.

And interesting idea on the wall-placement when clicking an empty "invalid move" square.  As for somehow alerting the player that some moves are invalid, we're working on that.  In HCI testing, players didn't notice they had a limited amount of walls.

Geoff Schreiber

Your help file is off by an index somewhere - when clicking on topics, I get the info for the topic below the one I've clicked...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Geoff Schreiber
Project Engineer
FASTechnology Group

shillermath

I would like to see the software calculate and optionally display these two metrics after each move:

1) Race count: the smallest number of pawn moves for each player to win with the current fences on the board

2) Path count: the number of path sets each player has; e.g., in the starting game position each player has a path count of one (please email me at larry@shillermath.com if you need a more precise definition of path count)

If a player's move does not provide an improvement in one or both of these, perhaps the software can provide an option to so indicate.

Larry Shiller

P.S.: I am writing a book on Quoridor strategy and tactics and welcome any suggestions for openings, middle game, end game play et al. I am happy to provide attribution.

William Grim

Quote from: shillermath on 2009-01-19T00:48:35-06:00 (Monday)
I would like to see the software calculate and optionally display these two metrics after each move:

1) Race count: the smallest number of pawn moves for each player to win with the current fences on the board

2) Path count: the number of path sets each player has; e.g., in the starting game position each player has a path count of one (please email me at larry@shillermath.com if you need a more precise definition of path count)

If a player's move does not provide an improvement in one or both of these, perhaps the software can provide an option to so indicate.

Larry Shiller

P.S.: I am writing a book on Quoridor strategy and tactics and welcome any suggestions for openings, middle game, end game play et al. I am happy to provide attribution.

The Quoridor senior project ended about three years ago.  However, if you want to have it reopened for consideration, you can submit a proposal to Jerry Weinberg.  Alternatively, you can try to contact the original developers directly and see if you can work out a deal with them.
William Grim
IT Associate, Morgan Stanley

Gregory Bartholomew

Hi shillermath,

It looks like the topic that you have replied to is a bit old (the previous reply was from 2006).  Seeing that this topic was about the software project of a senior project team, the users who were conversing in this thread are very likely no longer students here at SIUE.  There might be a few who still use this forum, but you would probably have better luck getting hold of them by emailing them directly at the email address they have listed on this http://www.cs.siue.edu/projects/senior/2005/3/1/ web page (their email addresses can be seen in your browser's status bar when you hover over the white envelope icons).

gb
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