Compsci 06, Spring 2011, Jotto Howto

Snarfing

This assignment provides some starter files you can use including two drivers for the Jotto program: one that interacts with the user on the command line and one that uses a graphical user interface or GUI to interact with the user. You'll write the program with which both of these drivers interact. The key here is that the program you write, called jottoModel, can be used with both user interfaces!

See snarfing help for information on how to use the Ambient/Snarf functionality in Eclipse. Note that the snarf URL for this semester is http://www.cs.duke.edu/courses/cps006/spring11/snarf

Overview

This assignment is about understanding global state/variables in a module and on how interactive programs, whether command-line or GUI-driven, communicate with a model. In general terms a model is one part of a program designed using what is called the model-view paradigm. The view is also the controller that runs the program. Sometimes software designers refer to model-view-controller which is a design based on three parts or modules. In this assignment there are two parts since the view/controller are wrapped into one module: either jottoMain.py for the command-line version or jottoGui.py for the GUI version. All code is in the code directory linked here.

Functions

In the jottoModel.py module you will need to add global state and implement the functions whose comments and signatures are provided. A function signature is its name, parameters, and return type. Read these descriptions carefully, but be prepared to fix mistakes as they arise since sometimes it is tricky to find errors when global variables are used.

Some of the functions will need to access (read) and sometimes alter (write) the different global state kept in the module. For example the load_words function is written for you and fills the global list _wordlist. This list will be used in start_game and possibly in other functions.

start_game needs to initialize the global state so that the first guess can be made. This will include creating a list of words that the secret word picked by the player could be, you should call this list _possiblewords. Initially _possiblewords contains the same words that are in _wordlist. You can't use _wordlist itself for the list of possible words because _possiblewords will change each time the user reports how many letters in common the guess has with the user's secret word. Be sure that start_game initializes all the state for a new game.
get_guess will return a randomly chosen word that could be the secret word, i.e., the word is chosen from _possiblewords. It will alter global state to keep track of what the word guessed is for the next function --- you'll need to determine what this state is, but please read the documentation for process_common_last carefully.
process_common_lst will use the number of letters in common that's passed to it as a parameter and the global state that represents the last word guessed by the computer to eliminate all words from the global list of possible secret words that don't have the same number of letters in common with the last guess.
For example, if the last guess is "ghost" (stored in global state) and the user chooses 3 as the number of letters in common which is then passed to process_common_last then the function removes all words from _possiblewords that do not have 3 letters in common with "ghost". You'll likely want to call commonCount in implementing process_common_last.
guess_count returns the number of guesses made by the computer in trying to guess the user's word. Ideally this will simply be returning the value stored in a global variable or the length of a global list or dictionary. Your code should not make signficant calculations in determining the number of guesses made.

A/Extra Credit

There are many algorithms for removing words that can no longer be guessed from the total available words. The one given above is perhaps the simplest to implement, but it has no intelligence about the problem it is solving. You will receive extra credit for developing a "smarter" algorithm than the one above, i.e., one that takes fewer steps to guess your secret word. After every one has submitted a solution, we will play them against eachother in a tournament to see whose is the best guesser.