This two-part course builds upon the programming skills that you learned in our Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python course. We will augment those skills with both important programming practices and critical mathematical problem solving skills. These skills underlie larger scale computational problem solving and programming. The main focus of the class will be programming weekly mini-projects in Python that build upon the mathematical and programming principles that are taught in the class. To keep the class fun and engaging, many of the projects will involve working with strategy-based games. In part 1 of this course, the programming aspect of the class will focus on coding standards and testing. The mathematical portion of the class will focus on probability, combinatorics, and counting with an eye towards practical applications of these concepts in Computer Science. Recommended Background - Students should be comfortable writing small (100+ line) programs in Python using constructs such as lists, dictionaries and classes and also have a high-school math background that includes algebra and pre-calculus.
Mini-project Video
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Из курса от партнера Rice University
Principles of Computing (Part 1)
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Из урока
Counting, growth of functions, higher-order functions
This week, we will explain the importance of counting in solving complex problems.
Познакомьтесь с преподавателями
Scott RixnerProfessor
Computer Science
Joe WarrenProfessor
Computer Science
Luay NakhlehAssociate Professor
Computer Science; Biochemistry and Cell Biology
[MUSIC]
For this week's mini project, you're going to implement
a simulator for the game of Cookie Clicker.
Now, Cookie Clicker is the silly little game that,
well, as the name implies, you click cookies in, alright.
And it's a little bit more interesting than that though.
You can click a cookie to get more cookies, but
you also can buy methods of production to create more cookies.
And so it's really a game about counting and optimization.
How do you strategize to buy the appropriate set of
items to maximize the number of cookies that you can produce?
And that's really what we're going to simulate here.
We're going to try and simulate different strategies for
Cookie Clicker and see how well we can do.
So, let's look at the game.
So, here is the Cookie Clicker game, and as you can
see, there's a big cookie here and I can start clicking it.
And, as I do, I get cookies.
Alright, now, you'll notice that gets kind of old pretty fast,
so I can go over here and I can, I got
enough cookies now that I can buy a cursor and this
little finger here will start poking the cookie for me, alright?
And so every once in a while I get some more cookies.
Okay.
Now, I can keep clicking because that's taking a long time.
Yeah, I can but another cursor if I wanted.
Notice that cursors cost more now than they did a second
ago, because every time I buy an item, its price increases.
Alright, so lets get up enough here and then I can buy the next item.
Alright.
So now, instead of a cursor, I can buy a grandma and
grandmas obviously bake cookies faster than I can poke the cookie over here.
Alright.
So, the grandmas are, are baking cookies for me or the one grandma.
Alright.
I can buy more cursors.
I can keep clicking here.
Alright, and you kind of get the idea already, okay.
There are other things that you can upgrade
to as soon as you get enough cookies,
you can start buying more things, and, you know, I'll but another cursor and so on.
Alright?
That's the basic idea behind the game, okay, it's really about now what strategy
am I going to use to maximize the number of cookies I can get.
As always, you should read the entire instructions for the mini project
before you start at all, and perhaps you should read it multiple times.
Okay.
To make sure that you understand what's going on.
Alright, now, if you look at the instructions here.
First, there is an overview, a little bit
of a description of the Cookie Clicker game which
perhaps will help you understand the game a
little bit more than my brief demo there, okay?
We are also providing code this time around
specifically we're providing a build info class and
this build info class is keeping track of the items that you can buy in the game.
So it's all the items that you are allowed to buy, what their
cost is and how much they increase your cookies per second production rate, okay?
And the build info class handles the fact that the costs go up every time you buy
a particular item so you notify it, hey, I'm
buying this item and it increases the cost appropriately.
'Kay, we have also pro, provided a little bit of other code and
you can read to the description here to understand that code as well, alright?
As with last time, you need to test your project, okay?
As you implement we strongly recommend that you test the code as you go, and
you use the simple test methodology that you
learned to use in the previous mini project.
We are also providing owl test page where you can go off and
run your test there and find out what your grade would be, okay?
This project is split up into three phases here.
Okay.
In the first phase, you're going to implement a clicker state class.
And this is really keeping track of the state of the game.
Okay, the build info class keeps track of, you know, the items that you
can buy and their costs,right, and how
much they increase your production rate by.
The clicker state class that you're going to,
to write keeps track of, your current state.
Like how many cookies you have right now, what your
current production rate is, and what you've bought in the past.
Okay.
So, this, here, this section here walks you through the different methods
that you're going to have to implement to get your, your clicker state.
Now once you have, a class to keep track of this state
of the game phase two is to actually write the simulation function, right?
To write a function that runs the game.
Okay?
Not, basically steps through the game and allows you
to increase the number of cookies be, based on your
production rate, allows you to buy new items based
on how many cookies you have and so on, okay?
And that's going to be the engine that runs the game.
Finally, once you've got that working, then you're
going to go beyond the simple strategy that we're going
to give you, which always picks cursor, no matter
what, and you're going to implement your own strategies.
And part of the fun, hopefully here is that you are going
to be able to implement your best strategy that you can, alright?
And you can see if you can do better than other people in the class.
Okay, so I just want to walk through the template briefly here.
Okay.
And as you can see, there is a clicker state
class and there is a skeleton for that class but even
before that, we have a constant here which is the
simulation time and you probably notice it's a very big number.
Okay.
I strongly suggest you comment that out and you put a much
smaller number in there for some time as you are developing your program.
You don't want to be debugging things when you're running for that long.
You want to run for a much shorter time.
You want to look carefully at what's happening
and make sure that it matches your expectations.
You'll also notice that there's this codeskulptor.set_timeout up here, okay?
And when you run for these long periods of time,
it might take longer than the five second timeout that CodeSkulptor
has, so you can adjust that upwards so that you can
let your simulation run for a longer time in Code Skulptor.
Okay?
Clicker State has a bunch of methods.
One thing you will notice there's a bunch of Get Methods.
These methods are because when we test your, your code, I have no idea
how you're going to internally represent the
information that you need for your state.
And that's not important, you, there's a choice that you get to make but when
we're testing things we have to see that,
you know, you have the correct game states.
So we have these Get Methods that allows us to get at the game states so that we
can understand and, you know, do you have the
correct game state of the current period of time, alright?
Then there's the three workhorse methods here.
Time and Tell, na- tells you how long until I have a certain number of
cookies, which will allow you to understand
when you can buy, you know, certain items.
And there's weight, that basically just allows you to accrue
cookies at the certain, at, at your current production rate.
And finally, buy item, which increases your production rate, and
reduces the number of cookies you have by its cost, 'kay.
Then your going to have to implement the simulate clicker function, which,
as I said before, runs the actual simulation of the game.
And then there are a bunch of strategy functions, you know, two of which we've
provided to you and then several of
which you're going to have to run, write yourself.
Okay?
And that's basically it.
And I want to encourage you to think about how you develop this mini project.
If you just try to write all of this code from scratch
at one, in one shot you're going to have a lot of trouble.
You want to build it up incrementally and start
to try and test, and understand if what you have
is working correctly before you go to the next
phase and that's certainly true again with that SIM TIME.
Did I already say that, Yes, I did.
I'm going to say it again.
You want to start simulating things at much shorter
time periods and looking very carefully at what's happening.
This game is deceptively simple, but we hope you have some
fun thinking about the counting and optimization aspects of the game.
However, don't think that because the game is simple
that programming a simulator for it is necessarily simple, okay?
There's a lot of complex things going on here.
And actually running the simulation correctly requires some thinking.
So do think about how you construct this program,
do make sure that you test things as you go.
And don't just, you know, whip every thing up and run it
for you know, ten billion cycles and hope for the best, okay.
Build things up slowly and carefully.
I also hope that you'll, you know, start to have a little bit
of fun as you implement the strategies, especially the best strategy that you can.
You know, it's a good opportunity to start to think about how do I optimize things?
How can I maximize the number of cookies that I'm going to be able to get.
And, you know, see if you can beat your friends.
Or, perhaps, more importantly, can you beat your instructors?
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