Graduate Assistance

I'm glad to realize that graduates from austin are coming in to help us with our project. They're using their own time to guide us through our android development which is quite encouraging. This past week we had another guider who graduated from UT Austin. He was a turing scholar, which is a prestigious title to have in the computer science department. This pretty much means he's a very skilled programmer and having him help us seemed just a bit excessive, but definitely worth it. We were finally able to tell why the game would stop before there was a real winner. He noticed that whether it be X's or O's, the game would stop when there were three of any in any order. This means that our program doesn't know how to differentiate between the two in some instance. Finding which instance this occurs in is the hard part because some times it works and other's it doesn't. We also came with a small-fix solution, in which we would get the computer to play atleast 5 moves before it stops, because every tic-tac-toe game requires atleast 6 moves for there to be a victor. But we quickly learned that it wouldn't actually solve the problem as the wrong winner would still be displayed after the 5 required moves and there's bound to be an error for forcing a game that wants to stop to go further.

On our way

Changing our app into a two player app rather than the already, one player app seemed to cause for harm than good at the point we are in right now. We would have to change so many aspects of the game that were previously meant to be for the computer and changing it to another human seemed to be taking us a step back. Also, we may want to save our project as another name, and then change it separately as not to mess with any of the computer player's code. The issues still pop up, each time being something different. This week, by chance we found another bug/cheat in the code. When playing on the phone, 3-4 blocks can be played at once by the human player, thus, being able to automatically win from the first turn. It's obviously pretty hidden since we only now figured about this glitch, so anyone playing our game (other than those reading this blog) wouldn't figure this out immediately. Now its all just about fixing the checkforWinner( ) method since that's where the major problem persists. There was a Youtube video which had a lot to do with the same project we're doing so we'll see exactly how much it helps next week.

The Final Semester

We have finally reached the final semester of our high school semester. 2013 is finally here; the year we've been waiting for the past 7 years. It still hasn't hit me that we're all going to go college students in half a year. For independent study, we're continuing to work on the android app development. We're specializing tic-tac-toe even more and we're getting back into the gist of the things. There was one error that stuck out the most. The user is still able to play a move after the computer or the player has won. For example, after the user get 3-in-a-row, the computer stops playing, and the text at the bottom of the screen says that the player wins, but the player can still fill the empty blocks with green x's. In the near future we'll be wanting to incorporate a two-player system, where there wont be any computer, instead there'll be two people.