Ruby Reversi

My progress on a reversi program has stalled. To help revive my interest in the project, I looked around for Ruby implementations. There are a couple from Japan on github. The one called Ruby Reversi looked like it would be easier to understand since it looks like a console application rather than an entire Rails app.

So far I've tried to get a grasp of the overall organization. It looks pretty logical. There are divisions based on the user interface, AI, game rules, board data, and some kind of dynamic controller. Of these divisions, two differences from my project that stand out. One is the separation of the game logic from the board's 2-d array data structure. I'm guessing that separating the 2-d array data structure from the game logic enables the 2-d array to be more reusable while isolating the specific problem domain code in the rule files. Perhaps this also helps readability because once one reads the file name "array2d" the behavior of that file is understood, and one can pretty much skip reading that code.

The other major difference is the method of program flow control. I'm not that familiar with Ruby, but it looks like his or her design is event based. When the user interacts with the program their actions raise events and are not causing a method to be called directly. Instead, it looks like an action method routes the event to the appropriate behavior. Benefits of this design may be those of using the command pattern: undo and macro operations. However I don't see those in the design. I'm not sure whether I like this way of organizing the behavior as it seems to complicate the initial reading, but it could have benefits in terms of centralizing and organizing how a program behaves.

Overall it was interesting to look over some one else's design and see some differences, such as in the language and the organization. It was not entirely obvious what the benefits and drawbacks are to the various differences, but by working on this post, I hope some of them were revealed. I also hope this post encourages me to finish the project.