Thu Oct 24

Questions about anything at all?

Where we are :

• booleans assignment due next Tuesday
• midterm due the week after that ... please be working on that.

Today : practice.

Chapter 9 is called "simulation and design" ... which discusses some ideas behind the practice of writing software. Please read that chapter.

We'll be discussing in class some of those ideas over the next week or so.

craps

Our goal today is to write together as a group a program that simulates the game of craps, and in particular estimates the odds of winning at craps.

See for example wikipedia - craps - rules of play for what exactly it means to "win at craps".

Writing software ideas (some from chapter 9) :

• Understand the problem and specific specifically what the code should do.
• Break the problem into smaller pieces - functions.
• Write and document good APIs for those pieces.
• "top-down design" - think about the big picture , even if the details aren't clear yet.
• "bottom-up implementation" - work on the details , even if how the small tasks dovetail together isn't clear yet.
• "prototyping and spiral development" - interative improvement - start simple and add features and complexity
• "unit tests" and doctests - making sure that the pieces are well defined and work as expected

So let's do this together.

What we ended up with is the attached craps.py.

$ python craps.py 
-- Compute winning probability for craps --
How many games? (^d to exit) 100000
You won 49286 games out of 100000 which is an average of 0.4929

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attachments

		last modified	size
	craps.py	Sun Dec 22 2024 08:55 am	2.3K