1. HEX: Eiffel Style Created By: Rory Murphy Daniel Tyszka

2. The Project We chose to implement the game which once used to be popular in the 60’s and 70’s. (A Beautiful Mind) Create a GUI for the game in which the user just has to click his or her way through a game. Once the game was built, wanted to add networking support.

3. The Solution: EiffelVision and EiffelNet GUI can be created easily with EiffelVision2. –Needed to draw the board and place a piece where the user clicks. –The ability to locate click events already exists. –Determine if a move is legal, if legal then place a piece, else handle the error and ask for another move.

4. The Solution Continued For networking, use EiffelNet, a cross-platform (almost) library for handling sockets. –Hides the dirty work (we’re lazy) –Easy as writing to a text file (almost ) For performance, send only a HEX_MOVE object. Allows for reusability of the code base, so a game being played at one console is not completely different than one being played over the network. Determining a win also adds to the complexity of a game.

5. Results Standalone game works perfectly. The networking is not yet perfected, but it should be completed in the very near future (i.e. within a few days). We have also seen a drastic rise in HEX addiction amongst friends.

6. Future Work We originally planned on having either AI or Networking support, chose networking because we like to see fierce inter-human competition. Creating an AI engine is somewhat challenging because it is not easily determined what move is “best”. Since Hex can be played on different size boards, the strategy can be drastically different. –If the board is size 7, a move toward the center is not ideal, though if playing on a board of size 10, somewhere near the center is the “best”. We have found some games online that have AI, and though it is a difficult problem for a computer, if a computer is given about 10 seconds to analyze moves it becomes nearly impossible for most people to win.

7. Got Hex? Visit http://www.nd.edu/~dtyszka/hex.html to download a copy today. We will be making revisions to the code periodically.http://www.nd.edu/~dtyszka/hex.html We may make the game Open Source eventually too.