Homework 7

Due Tuesday 5-Mar, at 10:30pm

To start

  1. Create a folder named hw7
  2. Create two files: hw7_lists.py and hw7_tetris.py (We are not providing starter files this week.)
  3. Edit hw7_lists.py and solve the autograded list problem below.
  4. Edit hw7_tetris.py and build Tetris as described below.
  5. When you have completed and fully tested hw7, submit each file to their appropriate assignment on Gradescope. For hw7_lists.py you may submit up to 15 times, but only your last submission counts. For hw7_tetris.py you make submit up 999 times, but only your last submission counts.

Some important notes

  1. This homework is solo. You may not collaborate or discuss it with anyone outside of the course, and your options for discussing with other students currently taking the course are limited. See the academic honesty policy for more details.
  2. Do not hardcode the test cases in your solutions.
  3. Remember the course’s academic integrity policy. Solving the homework yourself is your best preparation for exams and quizzes; cheating or short-cutting your learning process in order to improve your homework score will actually hurt your course grade long-term.

Limitations

Do not use sets, dictionaries, try/except, classes, or recursion this week. The autograder (or a manual CA review later) will reject your submission entirely if you do.

A Note About Style Grading

Like in the previous assignment, we will be grading your code based on whether it follows the 15-112 style guide. We may deduct up to 10 points from your overall grade for style errors. We highly recommend that you try to write clean code with good style all along, rather than fixing your style issues at the end. Good style helps you code faster and with fewer bugs. It is totally worth it. In any case, style grading already started, so please use good style from now on!

A Note About Testing

There is no skeleton file provided this week, meaning that we also are not providing testcases. You should write testcases for the autograded function. (You can find some nice ways to test in the write-up below, but you will need to translate those to actual testcases.)

For Tetris, as stated in the style guide, you do not have to write test cases for interactive, random, graphics, data initialization or event functions. Instead, you should test by visually inspecting your code’s behavior as you complete steps of each problem, where reasonably possible. This will make debugging your code much easier.

Problems

  1. bestScrabbleScore(dictionary, letterScores, hand) [25 pts]
    Background: In a Scrabble-like game, players each have a hand, which is a list of lowercase letters. There is also a dictionary, which is a list of legal words (all in lowercase letters). And there is a list of letterScores, which is length 26, where letterScores[i] contains the point value for the ith character in the alphabet (so letterScores[0] contains the point value for 'a'). Players can use some or all of the tiles in their hand and arrange them in any order to form words. The point value for a word is 0 if it is not in the dictionary, otherwise it is the sum of the point values of each letter in the word, according to the letterScores list (pretty much as it works in actual Scrabble).

    In case you are interested, here is a list of the actual letterScores for Scrabble: 
       letterScores = [
   #  a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m
      1, 3, 3, 2, 1, 4, 2, 4, 1, 8, 5, 1, 3,
   #  n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z
      1, 1, 3,10, 1, 1, 1, 1, 4, 4, 8, 4,10
   ]
    Note that your function must work for any list of letterScores as is provided by the caller.

    With this in mind, write the function bestScrabbleScore(dictionary, letterScores, hand) that takes 3 lists -- dictionary (a list of lowercase words), letterScores (a list of 26 integers), and hand (a list of lowercase characters) -- and returns a tuple of the highest-scoring word in the dictionary that can be formed by some arrangement of some subset of letters in the hand, followed by its score. In the case of a tie, the first element of the tuple should instead be a list of all such words in the order they appear in the dictionary. If no such words exist, return None.

    Note: you should definitely write helper functions for this problem! In fact, try to think of at least two helper functions you could use before writing any code at all.

    Another note: there is no fixed dictionary here. Each time we call the function, we may provide a different dictionary! It may contain 100 words or perhaps 100,000 words.

  2. Tetris [75 pts] [manually graded]
    Write Tetris according to the design given in this step-by-step tutorial. You may not use a different design, even if you think there's a better way to do it (there probably is, but you still have to do it this way). This may seem limiting, but sometimes you have to write code according to a specific algorithm, rather than writing code to solve a specific problem.