Top-Down Programming Example: Rock, Paper, Scissors

Step #1: Goal and General Algorithm Idea

The user chooses one of these, the computer chooses the other

• If the pair is “rock, paper”, the paper wins
• If the pair is “scissors, paper”, the scissors wins
• If the pair is “scissors, rock”, the rock wins

Specification: user enters selection of rock, paper, scissors

Program prints computer’s selection, who wins

At end, computer prints number of games human won and it won

High-level design:

• initialize score
• loop
• ask user for choice
• if quit, exit loop
• computer selects one
• select winner and increment win count
• endloop
• print number of games user won, computer won, ties

Step #2: Data Representation and Program Structure

Part #1: Data

Represent the rock, paper, scissors using strings: “rock”, “paper”, “scissors” (sequence things)

Represent commands as strings as above, plus “quit” (sequence cmdlist)

Store the scores in a dictionary with keys “user”, “computer”, “tie” and integer values (initially set to 0)

Part #2: Functions

• get user input – getuser()
• get computer choice – getcomp()
• determine winner – whowins()

Part #3: Refine algorithm \hspace*{3ex}

We can now put this into Python

while True:
	userchoice = getuser();
	if (userchoice == quit):
		break

	compchoice = getcomp();
	winner = whowins(userchoice, compchoice)
	score[winner] += 1
print "You won", score[“user”], "game(s), the computer won", 
print score[“computer”], "game(s), and you two tied", score[“tie”], "game(s)"

Step #3: Figure out who wins

Represent (object₁, object₂) where object₁ beats object₂$ as list of tuples, winlist. To see if user won, see if the (user-chosen object, computer-chosen object) tuple is in that list.

This leads to rps-prog1.py:

def whowins(user, comp):
    if user == comp:
        win = "tie"
    elif (user, comp) in winlist:
        win = "user"
    else:
        win = "computer"
    return win

Step #4: Get computer choice

Given the three objects in the sequence things, choose randomly.

This leads to rps-prog2.py:

def getcomp():
    pick = random.choice(things)
    print("Computer picks", pick)
    return pick

Step #5: Get user input

Loop until you get a valid input. If the user types an end of file (control-d) or an interrupt (control-c), act as though the user typed “quit”; report any other exceptions and then act as though the user typed “quit”.

This leads to rps-prog3.py:

def getuser():
    while True:
        try:
            n = input("Human: enter rock, paper, scissors, quit: ")
        except (EOFError, KeyboardInterrupt):
            n = "quit"
            break
        except Exception as msg:
            print("Unknown exception:", msg, "– quitting")
            n = "quit"
            break
        *** check input ***
    return n

To check input, we need to be sure it’s a valid command, so see if it’s in cmdlist:

        if n not in cmdlist:
            print("Bad input; try again")
        else:
            break

Put these together to get the user input routine.

Step #6: Make it human-friendly

The program now works correctly, but it’s rather unfriendly— the “game(s)” should be “game” or “games” as appropriate, and it should tell the user who wins each round. So we ned to add something to the while True loop in the main routine, and change the print statements at the end.

Telling the user who wins is straightforward. Simply put in an if statement at the end of the loop. One tricky point is that there are actually four conditions: winner can take on three known values (“user”, “computer”, and “tie”), and any other unknown value. It should never do the latter, but just in case, we program defensively and put a special case in to catch that. The resulting code is:

if winner == "user":
	print "You win"
elif winner == "computer":
	print "Computer wins"
elif winner == "tie":
	print "Tie"
else:
	print "*** INTERNAL ERROR *** winner is", winner
	break

Next, the program should distinguish between 1 “game” and any other number of “games” (note you say “0 games” in English). Again, we use an if statement to handle it. Both the computer’s number of games, the user’s number of game, and the number of tie games have to be handled.

print "You won",
if score["user"] == 1:
        print "1 game, the computer won",
else:
        print score["user"], "games, the computer won",
if score["computer"] == 1:
        print "1 game, and you two tied",
else:
        print score["computer"], "games, and you two tied",
if score["tie"] == 1:
        print "1 game."
else:
        print score["tie"], "games."

The resulting program is rps-prog3.py.

Matt Bishop Department of Computer Science University of California at Davis Davis, CA 95616-8562 USA

Last modified: Version of March 14, 2018 at 11:49AM Winter Quarter 2018 You can get a PDF version of this