c4-arena

A place for people to meet and play connect-4 with each other

How to run server

Install leiningen - http://leiningen.org/

Go to the base folder, and type lein run - it will use port 8001 for websocket connections and port 4222 for the nrepl connection

How to run client

Go to clients/ and run ./client.py --name Alice

There are two reference players that you can play against, and also two game engines that you can use, like this:

./client.py --name Bob --engine random --against random
./client.py --name Carl --engine neuralq --against aima

The AIMA reference client is from here. It's an IterativeDeepeningAlphaBetaSearch that's been restricted to 0.5 seconds of computation time.

You will need websocket-client, which can be installed by pip install websocket-client

Client protocol

Clients connect via websocket.

From client1:

{:type "start", :id "Alice"}

From client2:

{:type "start", :id "Bob"}

To client1:

{
:type "state",
:turn 1 :you 1
:state [0,0,0,0,0,0,
        0,0,0,0,0,0,
        0,0,0,0,0,0,
        0,0,0,0,0,0,
        0,0,0,0,0,0,
        0,0,0,0,0,0,
        0,0,0,0,0,0]
}

From client1:

{:type "move", :move 0}

State representation is column-major

To client2:

{
:type "state",
:turn 2 :you 2
:state [1,0,0,0,0,0,
        0,0,0,0,0,0,
        0,0,0,0,0,0,
        0,0,0,0,0,0,
        0,0,0,0,0,0,
        0,0,0,0,0,0,
        0,0,0,0,0,0]
}

The move you make is a column number

From client2:

{:type "move", :move 2}

To client1:

{
:type "state",
:turn 1 :you 1
:state [1,0,0,0,0,0,
        0,0,0,0,0,0,
        2,0,0,0,0,0,
        0,0,0,0,0,0,
        0,0,0,0,0,0,
        0,0,0,0,0,0,
        0,0,0,0,0,0]
}

And so on. When a winner appears, the server sends a state update:

To client1:

{
:type "state",
:winner 1
:turn 0 :you 1
:state [1,0,0,0,0,0,
        2,1,0,0,0,0,
        2,2,1,0,0,0,
        2,1,2,1,0,0,
        1,0,0,0,0,0,
        0,0,0,0,0,0,
        0,0,0,0,0,0]
}

To client2:

{
:type "state",
:winner 1
:turn 0 :you 2
:state [1,0,0,0,0,0,
        2,1,0,0,0,0,
        2,2,1,0,0,0,
        2,1,2,1,0,0,
        1,0,0,0,0,0,
        0,0,0,0,0,0,
        0,0,0,0,0,0]
}

and then sends

{:type "end"}

• If the other player terminates their connection, server will send

{:type "disconnected"}

• Any invalid messages result in a reply

{:type "ignored", :msg <copy of msg>}

• You can request the current state like this:

From client1:

{
:type "state_request"
}

To client1:

{
:type "state"
:turn 1
:you 1
:state [1,0,0,0,0,0,
        0,0,0,0,0,0,
        2,0,0,0,0,0,
        0,0,0,0,0,0,
        0,0,0,0,0,0,
        0,0,0,0,0,0,
        0,0,0,0,0,0]
}

License

Copyright © 2015 Chiao-Lun Cheng

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License version 1.0