The BoxShogi Project
Sandra Shi
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Introduction: This project is am implemenation of an mini shogi game between two players on an 5 * 5 board. It contains two modes: an interactive mode, which allows the players to play the game interactively, and the file mode, which takes in a file containing {board state, captures, a list of moves}, could parse the file and return updates to the game board accordingly.
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Correctness: The project passes all the test cases provided.
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Run: To run the file, uses the command provided in .command, as well as the test runner provide by Box.
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Design decisions: I decide that the game could be broken down into the following pieces: a. Piece, which represents the pieces in Shogi b. board, which represents the chess board c. square, which represents a specific square in the board d. player, which represents the players in game e. game, which is the game itself
All the pieces in Shogi, no matter in its promoted or unpromoted form, share certain similar attributes, and it makes sense to make all of them extend an abstract piece class.
I also noted that any move made by the player is essentially of two type: drop and move. For each type, we have a lot of edge cases to deal with, and need to be constantly mindful of the validity and change in game board & player capture's states. Therefore, I made an additional move class to make passing over such information simpler and more efficient.
- Time performance: The algorithm used by some of my methods coud have a high time complexity. In particular, when attempting to generate all possible moves a player could do to "uncheck" himself/ herself, I iterate thorugh all the pieces captured by the player, as well as all of the player's active pieces, then go to each of them's all possible moves, and attempt to drop/move a piece there to prevent check. Thankfully, the input size of the board is 5 * 5, and the game runs for at most 400 iterations, so time complexity has not become a huge burden.