CIS 636 Fall 2002 Assignment 6 – Simple Threads in Java 100 points

Assigned: 11/04/2002

Due: 11/18/2002 at the start of class

You may work individually or in pairs for this assignment. But all work must be the work of the person/people whose name is on the code! If working in pairs, the individual contributions should be relatively equal. One possibility is to work together tonight, then finish separately (to avoid communication difficulties).

Main Assignment:

We are going to use related but unsynchronized threads to work in (sort of) parallel on a problem. The task involves rating chess boards for how good they are for a player. The task will be divided up among threads so that each thread works on a particular row of the board (hence on a particular array of chess pieces). Each thread will calculate the rating for the row that it is responsible (store the result as an instance variable in the class that you create). You have been provided a ChessPiece class (see my WWW page) that you can make use of. We are working with a very simple rating scheme, like a child might use (my level of chess expertise !!). Each color is rated just based on the ratings of its remaining pieces. See getValue for piece ratings. You task is two write main that 1) kludges together a board setup to allow testing your other work; 2) starts a thread for each row, 3) retrieves the results from each thread, and 4) produces final summary results. You may set up your threads either extending Thread or implementing Runnable.

Hand in:

• Disk with an entire folder containing all your relevant files (including the corresponding Byte-code files), in the appropriate folder structure for your package declarations and imports.
• Print out of your code.

Miscellaneous:

· MAKE YOUR WORK ROBUST!

· Make sure that your main demonstrates that your code works.

· Put YOUR NAME, and e-mail address in comments at the beginning of the program.

· Remember: Indentation, meaningful variable names, and meaningful comments. Weaknesses in any of these could result in points off. You MUST include comments that explain your program in order to get full credit.