C Four, miGame, Part 3

Got back from hospital. Turns out the stone was 8mm. But had it blasted and feeling fine now.

I have little to no memory of how to make a C program. Lol...

Because I am using my old code this is going to be a very very poor example of good programming. I've noticed so so many little tweeks I could make. Blarg I haven't even started and I'm disliking C again... Such a tedious language. Luckily the two methods I'm going to use from the old program are set up well enough that I won't need to change anything.

First step: Create a new file for AI code.

From what I can find anywhere it is the same as in Java. Just do it. Examples didn't have 'include' or some other way for it to tell what file it is coming from so that makes things a bit easier. Except every method

Second Step: Allow AI's in the program.

I'm sure there is a much better way to do this but I'm going to hard code in an array of size two with either an h or a c to determine if the player is computer or human. Then add a check in the main loop and if it is a 'c' then call the computer MakeMove method.

Crap it's taken me 30 minutes to get the compiler to work again... Completely forgot everything. Now that I that done I can actually write some code. Woo!

Third Step: Write some code.

Create the AI using recursion to find the best possible move and go there. This is the fun part. Each time the computer is to make a move it will create a copy of the board and make it choose the first column then make the opponent go in the first column and so on and so forth until that column is full, then it moves to the next column and alternatively fills that. As soon as a win is detected the number of empty spaces on the board is the amount of points that win is worth. Then it starts again but places the its first move in the second column and then opponent in the first and it in the first. And so on and so on. This sounds like terrible way to do this. But computers are fast.To those that do program I'm going to be using recursion and so this SHOULD involve minimal code on my part. Which is the plan.

Going to start this now. [Start timer] 201105061147
[Pause timer] 201105061316
[Back again] 201105061650

LetterBloxHack

Situation:
So I found this awesome Robot class in Java that allows you to easily tell the computer where to click or what buttons to press on the keyboard etc. Sounds awesome right? I thought so. At the time I played a lot of games over at http://www.omgpop.com/. If anyone is familiar with LetterBlox, it's basically boggle. They give you some letters and from those letters you have to create words. Words are worth some value of points depending on rarity and size. The highest points win.

tl;dr Plays letterblox for you.

Solution:
This is part of the miGamer package I am working on. As we were having tournaments at university for who can play this game the best, and because it is easier, I went with another GIUless application. For this to work you must edit the code. As I am doing software engineering, having Eclipse open in the background was the norm. This allowed me to edit and run my program quickly and easily.

Notes:

1. To prevent an outright win, I have not perfected the program. That is it won't do every single combination.
2. Due to computer system restrictions and to prevent overloading the site, at most 10 combinations are attempted in a second.
3. To use the application you must change the char[] letters = {'F', 'A', 'D', 'R', 'T', 'S'}; to the letters produced for each round.
4. The application has a short delay before it starts to type the 'words' in. During this delay you should alt-Tab back to the game and click on the game. Otherwise you will see text typed into whatever is currently open.
5. Due to the game being clever I have allowed the application to attempt typing multiples of the same letter, even if there is only one. This will simply leave off the last occurrences. This causes some of the problems with missing some words, see note 1 for why this has not been fixed.
6. Again to due problems with typing when the game is over, this once caused my account to be disabled and ip suspended on the site, the application terminates after 60 seconds regardless of how far it has actually gotten to all attempts.
7. A suggestion I have had is rather than typing hundreds of incorrect or repeated answers, is to store a dictionary of words and use a look up to see if the word exists before typing. This, however, would cause the program to run a lot slower and finding the same dictionary used by the game would also be very difficult.
8. Again this code uses very little object oriented design ans so had I known how to do this in C, I would have.

The solution is in no way a perfect solution to the play the game. Although while using the application I have not lost a single match and so I believe it to be effective enough for the purpose it is built.

Code:

import java.awt.AWTException;
import java.awt.Robot;
import java.awt.event.ActionEvent;
import java.awt.event.ActionListener;
import javax.swing.Timer;

public class LetterBloxHack extends Robot implements ActionListener{
 // The timer allows a combination to be created every .1 seconds
 private final Timer TIMER;
 // The counter allows the timer to be stopped after 1 minute
 private long counter = 0;
 // An array of the letters
 private int[] LETTERS;
 // An array of the order of the letters
 private int[] press;
 // The current length of word
 private int size = 1;

 /**
  * Creates the LetterBloxHack object and begins after .5 seconds
  * @param letters the letters to be sorted
  * @throws AWTException
  * @throws InterruptedException
  */
 private LetterBloxHack(char[] letters) throws AWTException, InterruptedException {
  super();
  // Sets the timer with a 50 millisecond delay
  TIMER = new Timer(0, this);
  // Initialises the LETTERS field
  this.LETTERS = new int[letters.length];
  for (int i = 0; i < letters.length; i++){
   this.LETTERS[i] = letters[i];
  }
  // Initialises the press field
  press = new int[letters.length];
  for (int i : press){
   i = 0;
  }
  press[0]--;
  // Short pause
  Thread.sleep(500);
  // Begins the timer
  TIMER.start();
 }

 /**
  * Starts the program.
  * The letters to be sorted are inputed here by the user.
  * @param args
  * @throws AWTException
  * @throws InterruptedException
  */
 public static void main(String[] args) throws AWTException, InterruptedException {
  char[] letters = {'F', 'A', 'D', 'R', 'T', 'S'};
  LetterBloxHack hack = new LetterBloxHack(letters);
 }
 /**
  * Performs a sort every .1 seconds
  */
 public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent arg0) {
  // Increments the counter to stop after 1800 computations
  counter++;
  if (counter > 1800){
   TIMER.stop();
  }

  // Increment the first pointer
  press[0]++;

  try{
   for (int i = 0; i < size; i++){
    // Checks if a pointer is above the maximum
    if (press[i] >= LETTERS.length){
     press[i] = 0;
     press[i + 1]++;
     if (size == (i + 1)){
      size = (i + 2);
      for (int j = 0; j < size; j++){
       press[j] = 0;
      }
     }
    }
   }

   //  Types the characters
   for (int i = 0; i < size; i++){
    keyPress(LETTERS[press[i]]);
    keyRelease(LETTERS[press[i]]);
   }
   //  Types an enter
   keyPress(10);
   keyRelease(10);
  } catch (ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException e){
   //  Catches an exception that will represent the end of the sorting
   TIMER.stop();
  }
 }

}