Assignment Four: Othello

• Assigned: Friday, February 13, 1998
  
• Design Due: 8am, Friday, February 20
  
• Program Due: 8am, Friday, March 6, 1998

Summary: In this assignment, you will use the Matrix structure you built in a previous assignment to build an interactive Othello game.

Collaboration: You can work on this assignment in groups of up to size four, with three being an "optimal" size. You may discuss your design with any size group. You may also work with each other on general debugging issues.

If you work as part of a group, you are responsible for ensuring that all members of the group understand all sections of the assignment. You may (and should), however, break up the initial work. I'd say that in a three-person group, one could be responsible for the game board, one for the user input, and one for the interface between the two. In a two-person group, one person might be responsible for the board, and the other for everything else. In a four-person group, two people could work on the game board.

Once the pieces are coded, you can take on additional roles. One member might be responsible for developing reasonable tests, another for making sure that everyone understands the underlying code, and another for making sure that the documentation is readable.

Othello

Using your Matrix class from assignment 3, develop an object-oriented interface for Othello, a two-player game played on an NxM grid with black and white pieces. Your game should repeatedly prompt the current player for a move, determine whether the move is legal and, if so, make the move. If the player's move is illegal, you may either reprompt or make the player lose his/her turn (it's up to you which you do).

Try to design your game in such a way that it would be possible for one to change the rules, the design of the board, or the interface. (I don't expect you to completely succeed, but do your best.) For example, we might want to play Othello on a 4x4 board rather than an 8x8 board.

Rules

The basic rules of Othello are as follows.

• The game is played on an eight-by-eight board.
• The game begins with a four pieces in the center of the board, two black and two white in the following layout

   ***  /-\
   ***  | |
   ***  \-/
   
   /-\  ***
   | |  ***
   \-/  ***
  

• Players alternate moves, if they are able to make moves.
• The game ends when neither player can make a move (perhaps because there are no empty spaces, pehaps because one player no longer has pieces on the board). Whoever has more pieces on the board at the end of the game is the winner of the game.
• In a valid move, a player places a piece so that two of that player's pieces (the one just placed and one already on the board) completely surround one or more of the opponent's pieces, either horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. All the opponent's pieces are then "flipped" to become the moving player's pieces.
• If the placement of one piece surrounds more than one group of the opponent's pieces, all the surrounded groups are flipped.

Extra Credit

For extra credit, do one or all of the following:

• Provide interesting variants of the rules (or even let the user specify the rules in advance).
• Develop an intelligent computer player.
• Develop a more visual interface (e.g., that uses Java drawing primitives and perhaps even allows mouse-based input).