Engineering Projects/Poppit/Howard Community College/Fall2011/501 jupiters

Problem Statement

Determine a way to play the game Poppit in such a way as to clear the screen of all balloons every time.

Team Members

This is a Poppit project team called Jupiter

team pages 10/10 ... good job 1sfoerster 17:55, 7 September 2011 (UTC)

Summary

We began our process using a very simple mathematical hypothesis. When that failed to produce satisfactory results, we moved on to figuring out different ways to target single balloons. We eventually developed a strategy that consistently produces a satisfactory low score, but never managed to eliminate every balloon.

Story

Our initial strategy involved determining whether the number of each color of balloon was the same for each game, or if there was a pattern to determine how many balloons there were. Over the course of building statistics, we discovered that the number of each color of balloon appears to be random.

The next strategy we developed was to eliminate the largest groupings of balloons of the same color first, moving down toward the smaller groups. The average amount of balloons left at the end of the game for this method was 23. We then moved on to attempting to match single balloons to larger groups. We tried moving balloons from the bottom of the grid to the top, and from the top to the bottom. Between these two methods, working from the bottom up yielded better results. We also tried focusing on eliminating columns of balloons, both from the edges to the center, and the center to the edges. The lowest score yielded starting from the center was 3 balloons remaining, and the lowest score working from the edges was 8.

The strategy we determined to be most effective was to target single balloons. The method by which we attach single balloons to larger groups is to eliminate columns from the center of the grid to the edges, with a focus on eliminating balloons on the bottom of the grid.

Lastly,we have tried the programming language even though it was unsuccessful. We had all the data we needed and we worked on how could we put these data into Processing program and create a software? We used some examples some tutorial in the program to understand how it works.It was very challenging. In the end, we could not create a software to play against the Poppit.

Material List

In order to complete this project the only materials needed were a computer with Internet connection. Our Computation Notebooks were the only things needed to be purchased but it was class requirement so we already had them before the assignment started.

Software List

Google Chrome
Processing

Time

Our team was assigned to complete the project in a three week period with at least was 8 hours a week per team member. A total of 48 work hours was estimated to complete the project. At the end of the project we accumulated 25 hours of work invested into the project.