Plug-in

Your task will be to create a piece of program which will be plugged in the engine. We have developed an intelligent way of connecting you program with our engine. This allows the engine to be used to for games between teams programmed by different group without any problem. Every group just brings its plugin, we effectively plug them into the engine and we are ready to start the game!

Note:

An interesting side effect of this structure is that cheating get very difficult. Indeed some people may toy around with the idea of changing the PACSengine. But we will bring a fresh copy of the engine program for each game. You on the other hand will only bring the code for you team. Due to this separation of the code tampering with the engine code is pointless. This being said...
If you can not imagine what all this means or how to do that do not worry. Together with the program for the game engine we provide you with a demonstration player. You can have a look at the program of the demonstration player to see how you could write a player. And of course you will be able to see how the connection with the engine is achieved.

The basic idea is rather simple. Each player must provide exactly one procedure to the PACSengine. For the explanation we call it play, this is no the name used by the engine and is only meant to introduce the idea. So how does it work?

  1. You have to write a play procedure for each of your players.
  2. We take care of making the connection between the engine and your players.
  3. We execute the play procedure of each player exactly once for each turn of the game
We execute the last step for the number of turns required to end the game. By doing so we make each player "play" once every turn.

Warning:

The different play procedure are executed in an arbitrary order. You thus should make sure that your player is do not dependent on the order (sequence) in which the different play procedure are executed. If you do so you player may turn out not to work anymore when plugged in at a different moment!

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