Tag Archives: model building

Building an AI with ASyncTask

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I’ve wanted to add an AI for the 10.000 game, since giving users a single player option seems like a necessity, if I want to retain them. I for one was getting a little bit tired of playing both sides, if I couldn’t find someone else to play against.

The game before implementing the AI
Up until now the game has been built around the assumption that only users generated input for the game. I didn’t really take any measures to incorporate alternative input methods that an AI could use.

Drawing the architecture of the app you’ll get:

UI –> Model

Needless to say I’ll put a little bit of thought into the architecture, before punching in any lines of code, since there’s no simple way to integrate it in the existing architecture. As the model stands now, it has a set of methods that you can use to manipulate it’s state with, giving me some flexibility.

Examples of this are:

public boolean canRoll()
public void performRoll()
public boolean performLock(int diceNo)

Caveat: Expanding the app with an AI
I could write an AI class, that could manipulate the model, using the available methods. However, if I did that;

  1. How would the AI know when to update and when not to?
  2. How would the UI know when to allow user input and when not to?

Using the Observer pattern (through the Java event model) enables me to publish events. With these events I can trigger the two classes and thus get them to do something, be it a calculation, a move etc. It doesn’t however limit them from performing actions, when any or every event is published. The Command pattern could probably be used in this regard, to give the model some uniform way of validating which actions are ok and which are not. That partly solves the problem, since it does not limit the AI would from performing a task and the UI would still enables user generated input.

The proposed changes so far
Updating the architecture with the AI gives me a diagram:

UI –> Model <– AI

It only states that the UI and AI should exist as separate objects and that they can independently make calls to the model. To ensure that only the allowed object can perform actions at a given time, the model needs to check who’s making the calls.

Caveat: Figuring out who invokes a method

The model could use Reflection to figure out who invoked a given method. Using Reflection does generate an overhead in resource consuption, compared to simpler solutions, and I’m not entirely convinced that it is secure. I base that assumption on this thread.

A simpler implementation would be to change all public method signatures to include a reference to the calling object as the first parameter. This must be filled out with a “this” reference, when any object tries to call a method, thus ensuring a check for legality of the performed call. The solution doesn’t gurantee a solution to the security issue 100%, since you could just pass a reference to another object, but I’ve decided there’s no need to bring out any bigger guns, when ther’s only a game of 10.000 at stake.

The aforementioned examples gets updated to:

public boolean canRoll(Object caller)
public boolean performRoll(Object caller)
public boolean performLock(Object caller, int diceNo)

Now we’re getting somewhere 🙂

Implementing the AI

Since the AI will be doing some computations and needs to be able to idle for a bit, so that the user the AI performed actions separately in the UI, it’s necessary to place this in a separate thread.

Caveat: AI and the UI thread
Implementing the AI (by extending the Thread class or implementing Runnable) doesn’t detach the AI from the UI. This means that when the AI goes into a wait state or does some computations, it’ll lock up the UI. This is a sure way of degrading the user experience and may even result in some ANRs. It should be obvious that you’ll want to avoid this.

The answer is using AsyncTask to detach the AI from the UI. The AsyncTask is part of Androids threading framework and solves the problem of locking your UI thread. An alternative could be using an IntentService, but with a litte careful programming I believe that an ASyncTask will solve my problem just fine.

One thing to be aware of though, is if your app gets reloaded, for instance if you rotate the screen, the AsyncTask will be killed. Program your solutions accordingly.

 

That pretty much wraps up my thoughts for how to expand the architecture in the 10.000 app. Be sure to check back for more information 🙂

Model building for 10.000

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When I started working on the 10.000 game, I had some ideas and concepts I wanted to try out when building the model. I’d like to share some of my thoughts on the process and the product.

What is the objective of the model?
My goal with the model was to make a clear separation between the logic and state of the game and the user interface. The benefits I was hoping to achieve was first and foremost a division of the task at hand, by dividing the application into a user interface part and a model part. Secondly making it easier to swap UIs, by decoupling it from the model, in case I’d redesign the UI later on. Thirdly I wanted to encapsulate the variables that stored the state of the game, thereby making sure rules would be enforced and thus keeping the model in a valid state all the time.
A lot of this stems from the teachings and common programming practices like the MVC architectural pattern and I saw no reason why this solution couldn’t be applied to the task at hand.

What is the tradeoff?
All of these benefits comes at a cost of course. During the development of the game I kept track of how much time I spent on the different tasks. I’ve given a short list below of the time allocated to different tasks (this only covers the initial version).

  • Designing the solution: 24% (~16 hrs)
  • Graphics: 5% (~3 hrs)
  • Programming UI: 37% (~25 hrs)
  • Programming model: 28% (~19 hrs)
  • Testing and debugging: 4% (~2 hrs)
  • Publishing: 3% (2 hrs)

I can’t say for sure, but I guess that if I had merged the model and UI and didn’t care about the benefits that the seperation gives, I could probably have saved 10 hours divided evenly between designing and programming, which equates to something like a 15% reduction. This is of course my ad hoc estimate based on the size and complexity of the game and it’s rules. I don’t think you could use this as a generic rule 🙂

Encapsulation vs. performance
Another thing to consider is the fact that the encapsulation adds a layer of method calls that could be removed, if variables where directly accessed in the code. I read that internal getter/setter methods should be avoid, due to performance overhead. I’m guessing merging classes and then accessing variables directly would yield the same benefits.
I haven’t tried profiling the game, to see if there are any performance drops. The tests I’ve done on the UI haven’t had any issues so far, like an ANR for example.

What benefits did this give after release?
After the first release I’ve made some improvements to the game. These have been bundled in three new versions. All of these have been rather fast to develop and I contribute a lot of this to the initial investment in time spent on design and model programming. Again, if I where to venture a guess I’d say that the time I could have saved on the initial release I’ve gained in the latter releases.

So I think my bottom line is; Solid design and good programming practices saves time in the long run.
It has certainly saved me a lot of frustration 🙂