6.170 Laboratory in Software Engineering
Spring 2002
Final Project (Antichess) Amendment: Board Holes

Handout F5

Contents:

Background

The 6.170 staff has enjoyed using your initial implementation, but wants to introduce the possiblity of irregular board shapes. You will extend Antichess to support missing squares. The missing squares, or holes, will allow users to create their own boards of arbitrary shape. The intent of this amendment is to test the extensibility of your exisiting design and your group's ability to adapt to requirements changes.

Board Holes

Your final product will have to support board holes in which pieces can not land and non-knight pieces cannot cross. A pawn which is faced with a hole will be promoted to a queen just as it would have if it were faced with the end of the board. Regardless of board shape, a white pawn on the 2nd rank or a black pawn on the 7th will have the option of moving 2 squares (assuming both of the squares are not holes and unoccupied).

It is clear that board holes can significantly change the game play of antichess, so computer players playing on non-standard boards aren't required to produce anything better than random, valid moves.

It is not required that your final project provide an editor for boards, but it must support loading, saving and playing games on non-standard (holy) boards.

Detailed Requirements

The Detailed Requirements (Appendix 1) section of the original specifications are amended as follows.

Game File Format

The antichess application must be able to load files of the following format, and must produce files which begin with the following format (additional lines may be added to store information like player types, names or levels). On consecutive lines the file format contains: next player, white time, black time, and 8 lines for board state with upper-case letters for white, lower-case for black, dashes (-) for empty, and spaces ( ) for holes. The following is a formal discription of the file format: <game-file> ::= <next-turn-color> newline <timeleft> newline <board> <next-turn-color> ::= black -- white <timeleft> ::= <int> newline <int> <board> ::= <row> <row> <row> <row> <row> <row> <row> <row> <row> ::= <sq> <sq> <sq> <sq> <sq> <sq> <sq> <sq> newline <sq> ::= - | | <piece> <piece> ::= P | p | K | k | N | n | R | r | Q | q | B | b The fields in the file are: As an example here is a load file for a standard initial board configuration. Time left for each player is 5 minutes (300000 milliseconds). In conventional layout, the white pieces are in the bottom two rows and black pieces in the top two. 
white
300000
300000
rnbqkbnr
pppppppp
--------
--------
--------
--------
PPPPPPPP
RNBQKBNR
Here is an example with a non-standard board in which black is about to promote a pawn. 
black
20021
34210
 -bqkb-
---pp---
--n--N-n
-- -- --
-- -- --
--------
---PP---
 -BQKBN

Ambiguities

Parts of this amendment have been left intentionally vague. It is up to you to decide what (if any) clarifications are necessary. You should include any changes to your Revised Specification documentation in your final submission on May 13.

Design Decisions

Spend some time thinking about the best way to incorporate this change into your design. In your final design write-up, be sure to discuss the changes to your initial design (and the relevant trade-offs). You will be graded on how easily your initial design can support the amendment, and how cleanly you incorporate the amendment into your design.

Change Log

This section will detail the changes made during revisions of this handout. You may use the version number at the bottom of your hardcopy to determine what has changed since you printed this handout.

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