The classic game with some extra features, including heuristic computer player strategies.
Up front the game gives the user some choices to spice things up a bit:
- Do you want to play the computer or another player?
- Do you want to play instant-death, the best 2-out-of-3, or indefinite?
- Do you want to play RPS or Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock?
When you have a game that relies on guessing against a computer, how to you make sure that the computer is not cheating?
You can examine the source code, of course, and see that the computer is not looing at the user's response before making a choice.
As much as possible, we try to get the user's response and report the computer's choice at the same time. Just like RPS against another human, we have a countdown to the moment both players (computer and human) report their move.
If your computer opponent is choosing randomly, is this game any fun?
In other words, isn't half the fun of RPS trying to outsmart your opponent while they are trying to outsmart you? You find yourself choosing a throw because you suspect the other player is selecting a throw to counter what you think they think you are going to throw.
To that end, the computer player has strategy implemented, both to make it a more challenging opponent, but also so you can waste brain power trying to figure out what the computer thinks you are going to throw.
With a program that runs in the terminal, usually we can just print stuff out as it happens. But since we need to accept user input while we are doing a countdown, we needed to use the capability of most terminals to turn off echoed key presses and buffered input. We were originally considering using ncurses but instead decided to use an ordinary scrolling terminal.
As much as possible, I tried to keep data about the game in a separate module for portability, translatability, and flexibility.
I won't detail the strategy here, but I will say that there are several strategies that the computer uses, even attempting to guess the strategy the player may be using to counter it.
Simple:
git clone https://github.com/wmodes/rock-paper-scissors.git
cd rock-paper-scissors
python rpc.py
In order to make it as portable as possible, we use only modules that are included with most python distributions:
- os and sys, for various terminal access
- time, for timing responses and the countdown
- textwrap, to print the text nicely
- re, for regular expression matching
- random, for making the text less predictable and for some computer strategy
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