Boxes

Dots and Boxes is a classic old-school pencil and paper game where the goal is to complete more boxes than your opponent.

Note this is old, buggy and incomplete. Email me if you're interested in any of this.

Referee program.
Sample player.
Interface.

Installation

Select which GTK you have (or none at all).
Select curses.
known successes: debian i386-linux (all).
known problems: sparc-solaris (curses).

Then hopefully it's just a case of:
%make

External players

FIXME: columns are lower case letters. The file format used to communicate with external player programs is as follows:

The first line is a pair of integers representing the width and height of the game board (in boxes).
The second line is a pair of integers denoting the current scores of the player to go next and the other player, respectively.
The following lines indicate moves already made in the game, in an undefined order.

An FIXME example is available. The program should print a move (as specified above) to it's standard output.

To Do

limits of board are 12 and 50, so interface-console works.
figure out a simple autoconf / automake setup that detects if curses / GTK x is present.
when interface.c is regenerated, nix reference to config.h and support.h
write a minimax player in Haskell (cf dabble).
fix GTK2 interface.
curses bug: stderr/stdout (?) output in scrambled order. strategic flushing required...
GTK: setup board option, about window.
GTK: undo/redo: who gets a go after the undo?
RXVT bug: the bold attribute doesn't work for the ACS_HLINE character (works under xterm).
GTK: this interface must be invoked with "human" as the first player. TODO: get it working with various player combinations. - add intermediate and expert players - hack or drop the haskell players - get program v program working - fixup setup board - who goes next? - adopt dabble-style input files - expand this README - test curses/gtk on more platforms (alpha, sparc) - merge andrewt's mod's - straighten out array indices. - GNU-ify things - automake? - test "make install" - tweak install instructions

References

Dabble
The Dots and Boxes Game: Sophisticated Childs Play by Elwyn Berlekamp.

Legal

Boxes is licenced under the GPL, with explicit permission granted to link against the libraries it requires (viz a potentially proprietary CURSES implementation). Some code was stolen lock-stock from the GNU Classpath project. Be kind to it.

    Boxes.
    Copyright (C) 2002 Peter Gammie (peteg at unsw dot edu dot au)

    This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
    (at your option) any later version.

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    GNU General Public License for more details.

    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
    along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
    Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA

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Peter Gammie

Last modified: Tue Feb 10 23:21:05 CET 2004