While suffering through the internet downtime at HackUCI, me and a couple of other computer science enthusiasts discussed the coins-in-a-line dynamic programming problem. It involves playing against an adversary and finding the optimal strategy to obtain the highest amount of money. A computer scientist could devise a dynamic programming algorithm that solves this problem no matter the size of the coin line. However, how does a human fare in this scenario?
The obvious way for me to answer to question was to test it out. And to test it out, I had to make a game out of it, because after all the coins-in-a-line problem is essentially a game where both players are playing the optimal strategy. Thus Coinz was born. I played with many iterations of this game, by changing values, the amount of coins, the turn times and had a lot of fun seeing how far ahead others could think. The version uploaded on this repo is merely one of the many that were devised on that day, but it serves to demonstrate the essence of the experiment. It turns out games can be a great way to test the capabilites of the human mind. and to also have fun while your at it!
I built the game using Unity and C#. Looking back, there were many ways I could have improved the build to make it more scalable, but I was just bored with no internet at HackUCI so I wanted to whip out something quick and effective. Maybe I will return to it someday to not only optimize it, but to maybe even implement all the crazy ideas I discussed with my friends.