Project 3: A Magical Code

Citation and License

This project belongs to Department of Computer Science, Columbia University. It may be used for educational purposes under Creative Commons with proper attribution and citation for the author TAs Joe Adams (first author), and the Instructor, Prof. Kenneth Ross.

Summary

Course: COMS 4444 Programming and Problem Solving (Fall 2022)
Problem Description: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~kar/4444f22/node20.html
Course Website: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~kar/4444f22/4444f22.html
University: Columbia University
Instructor: Prof. Kenneth Ross
Project Language: Python

TA Designer for this project

Joe Adams

Teaching Assistants for Course

Joe Adams
Rohit Gopalakrishnan

Installation

Requires python3.9 or higher.

Also requires numpy.

Usage

Simulator

python main.py

Optional Flags

usage: main.py [-h] [--seed SEED] [--agent AGENT] [--messages MESSAGES] [--output OUTPUT] [-n N] [--null_rate NULL_RATE] [--verbose] [--rand_n]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --seed SEED, -s SEED  seed used by random number generator. Default is 42. Specify 0 to generate random seed.
  --agent AGENT, -a AGENT
                        which agent to use from 1 to 8. d for default
  --messages MESSAGES, -m MESSAGES
                        name of file holding messages to encode
  --output OUTPUT, -o OUTPUT
                        name of the output file where decoded messages and scores are stored
  -n N                  set number of shuffles per deck for this mission
  --null_rate NULL_RATE, -nr NULL_RATE
                        set the probablility (between 0 and 1) of giving agent a random deck instead of a message
  --verbose, -v         verbose mode includes encrypted and shuffled decks in output
  --rand_n, -rn         (boolean) sets n to be a random value up to N for each deck

Other Information

Decks are represented as a list of integers from 0 to 51.

Agent encode function is given a string and should return a legal deck.

Agent decode function is given a deck and should return a string. This string should be "NULL" if the agent believes this is a random deck.
This string should begin with "PARTIAL: " if the agent believes they are returning a partial message (single space after the colon is removed from message).

Speculative / A-Magical-Code