August 6, 2015 Log No. 316

First solo day today! Hah it’s strange to think that I used to think pair programming was unusual; now it’s days like today, our first non-pair day, that feel different. However it was nice having my very own(!) keyboard and mouse.

The assignment was to create a Checkers game (apparently, according to Wiki, “English draughts”). It was a really good review of methods and concepts we had covered over the past couple of days, and was pretty straightforward after Chess and Minesweeper.

I got my board rendered nicely with unicode and colorize, my HumanPlayer input/error checking up and running, and finally coded some ComputerPlayer AI that actually wasn’t terrible. (Ok still pretty terrible, but satisfactory for Checkers–no sense of strategy but can chain jumps! Once again, pretty much on par with my level of strategy.) By the end I was just setting AI vs AI and watching them bounce around the board. Given that Checkers is a pretty simple game, it concludes fairly quickly, though still very satisfying, not least because it’s always nice when a program runs and completes without bugs.