tzaar

Clojure implementation of the abstract strategy game Tzaar by Kris Burm

Usage

You can play tzaar from Clojure and from Java.

You can create your own AI by implementing the Player interface. Your implementation should not have to keep track of the game state. When the play method on your AI gets called all essential game state gets passed into it. The game engine should be able to re-use your AI instance for other games as well. You are of course allowed to use state for purposes of machine learning or anything else but be wary of these requirements. Also the implementation of play needs to be thread-safe.

From Clojure

With Leiningen/Boot:

[org.fversnel/tzaar "0.1.1-SNAPSHOT"]

Implementing a new player (human or AI):

(defrecord YourAI []
  tzaar.player/Player
  (-play [this game-state play-turn]
    ; AI logic here

    ; Submit the turn asynchronously
    (play-turn turn)))

Starting a game:

(require [tzaar.game :as game])

(game/play-game game/random-but-legal-ai
                (YourAI.)
                game/default-board)

From Java

Add tzaar to your Gradle build file:

repositories {
    maven { url "http://clojars.org/repo" }
    mavenCentral()
}

dependencies {
    compile "org.clojure:clojure:1.9.0-alpha12"
    compile "org.fversnel:tzaar:0.1.2-SNAPSHOT"
}

Implementing a new player:

public class YourAI implements tzaar.java.Player {
    @Override
    public void play(final GameState gameState,
                     final Consumer<Turn> playTurn) {
        // AI logic here

        // Submit the turn asynchronously
        playTurn.accept(turn);
    }
}

(Also check out tzaar.java.ExamplePlayer to see typical API usage)

Starting a game:

final Object whitePlayer = Api.RANDOM_BUT_LEGAL_AI;
final Object blackPlayer = new YourAI();
Api.playGame(whitePlayer, blackPlayer, Api.randomBoard());

Using the runner

Once you got your AI ready to go you can pack it into a jar and run it with the tzaar runner. The runner is a command-line program that works as follows:

First build the runner with Leiningen

> lein uberjar

Then command it to run a few games:

> java -cp "your-ai.jar;target/tzaar-0.1.0-SNAPSHOT-standalone.jar" \
 tzaar.runner \
 -white tzaar.players.ai.provided.RandomButLegalAI \
 -black package.name.YourAI \
 -games 10 \
 -logging true

Outputs:

Played 10 games of Tzaar:
White (RandomButLegalAI) wins 30% of the games in average 25 turns
Black (YourAI) wins 70% of the games in average 24 turns

To be done

• Allow for optional use of chess-like clocks
• Add GUI
• Add JSON Api
• Add support for Clojurescript
• Write a clojure.spec and use it to write tests

License

Copyright © 2016 Frank Versnel

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License version 1.0