Every spring quarter the CPTR 143 programming class at Walla Walla University codes Conway's Game of Sprouts for a final project. The students are supposed to create a new version from previous code with the final goal of creating an unbeatable AI. However, except for one three-year streak, most years people recode the program basically from scratch due to differing design approaches, not wanting to read other people's messy code, etc. The CPTR 143 class of 2013 chose to take the 2010v2 code, which looked like a single person's side project to check for line crossings graphically, as the basis for the new version. However, like other years, after spending much time in designing a foundation, a simple and unified data structure for storing nodes and lines, we chose to recode most of the basic design. We have provided the A-Checker as a working, well-tested foundation for future years and provided an experimental, partially-working AI and GUI that respectively inherit from each other and from Game, the A-Checker.
Because of people's differing preferred platforms, we have made this cross-platform.
Throughout the year we used CodeBlocks to code in class. We chose to provide
project files for Windows in codeblocks/Sprouts_windows.cbp. This will
link to the included SDL libraries. If you want to run the A-Checker tests,
build the project codeblocks/AChecker.cbp.
Note: On Windows SDL will not output to the command prompt, so you'll
have to open stdout.txt to see the output.
To install the libraries, you can use any package manager, for example:
Fink (untested): fink install sdl sdl-image sdl-gfx13 sdl-ttf
Macports (tested): port install libsdl libsdl-framework libsdl_gfx libsdl_image libsdl_ttf
After this, you can either setup a CodeBlocks file or run make to compile
and ./sprouts to run. To run the tests, make tests; ./tests/tests.
Install whatever provides the following. Dependencies:
- SDL
- SDL_gfx
- SDL_image
- SDL_ttf
Then, run make to compile and ./sprouts to run. You can also run the
tests with make tests; ./tests/tests.
To provide easy access to all of the files, they are stored in two places. The code can be accessed from the GitHub link below. If future years decide to use this code as a basis, they can easily either fork it or clone and push to their own repository on GitHub or elsewhere. A few key documents are in the docs/ folder, but the rest of the documentation is on the wiki linked to below. All of the classes have a page documenting what they consist of for easy reference and searchability.
Github Code
Sprouts Wiki (dead link)