Yak-Tak is a game of Tic-Tac-Toe that will never lose to a human player. You'll wish you had played Global Thermonuclear War instead.
Yak-Take is built on top of Flask.
To get running with Yak-Tak, you'll need to have Python. Yak-Tak is developed and tested to run on Python 2.7.x (32-bit). It may run on other versions of Python, but this is not a guarantee.
Yak-Tak depends on the following Python packages:
To install all of these dependencies, simply run:
> pip install -r requirements.txt
If you are on Windows and don't have the pip command, you must install it first. Check the pip and distribute on Windows section for more information about how to do that.
(Documentation originally copied from Flask docs on pip and distribute.)
On Windows, installation of easy_install is a little bit trickier, but still quite easy. The easiest way to do it is to download the distribute_setup.py file and run it. The easiest way to run the file is to open your downloads folder and double-click on the file.
Next, add the easy_install command and other Python scripts to the command search path, by adding your Python installation's Scripts folder to the PATH environment variable. To do that, right-click on the "Computer" icon on the Desktop or in the Start menu, and choose "Properties". Then click on "Advanced System settings" (in Windows XP, click on the "Advanced" tab instead). Then click on the "Environment variables" button. Finally, double-click on the "Path" variable in the "System variables" section, and add the path of your Python interpreter's Scripts folder. Be sure to delimit it from existing values with a semicolon. Assuming you are using Python 2.7 on the default path, add the following value:
;C:\Python27;C:\Python27\Scripts
And you are done! To check that it worked, open the Command Prompt and execute
easy_install. If you have User Account Control enabled on Windows Vista or
Windows 7, it should prompt you for administrator privileges.
Now that you have easy_install, you can use it to install pip:
> easy_install pip
You can run Yak-Tak by simply running the following command:
> make
Then open up your favorite browser and visit http://localhost:5000/.
Unit tests are provided. Simply run the following command:
> make test
I did not optimize this application for performance. I wanted to accomplish this application in a straightforward way and focus on making it testable as a primary goal.
The web interface is built using JavaScript and HTML5. I'm developing it with Chrome and I plan to test it with Firefox, but I do not plan to test it on too many browsers to save me some time. I'm also not testing this on mobile devices, at least not now.
Also, the web interface is using expanded JavaScript and CSS. If this were a hosted game I'd worry about minimizing and compressing these assets to make as few requests as possible, but this game is only going to be run locally.
Python is an amazingly flexible language that lets you use Object-Oriented patterns when you need them. I chose to make the computer player (wopr) a library of functions because I am a firm believer that you should only use Object-Oriented programming where you need its benefits.
To build the computer player I took inspiration from functional programming and made each function independent from one another and always return something, even if it's a value of None. This makes it easy for me to arrange these functions to build a whole computer player using null coalescing (at least that's what the C# people call it). Maybe in the future I'll make several versions of the computer players, one that's interesting to play against and makes mistakes.
When I started this project I thought about how to make the computer player. Tic-Tac-Toe is an easy enough game to pre-compute all the possible games that can be played with a modern machine. However, I think it's more fun to design strategies and see how they play out. Maybe I made more work for myself, but this is the first computer player I've written.
Hope you like it.