Connect 4 in C++

[badgermonkey]

Hi,

I have to code a connect 4 game in c++. The game should be played on a 7x6 (7 across 6 up) grid, which should be stored as a 2D array.

This is being done as a console application (in DOS box basically), so windows programming is unneccessary. The pieces can be displayed as different letters, eg. R and B.

I also need to program AI to play against. The AI must be able to make smart decisions, such as blocking pieces, and attempting to win etc.

I don't need to include diagonals in the winning criteria, however if I do there is the potential for very large bonus marks.



If anyone could give me advice on what I need to look at using, perhaps a bit of help on the AI etc it would be extremely useful It's just I've sat here for 2 hours and all I've managed to do is initialised the array as follows.

#include "stdafx.h"
#include <iostream.h>

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
	int gridWidth = 7 ; int gridHeight = 6 ;	
	int gridArray[gridWidth][gridHeight] ;

	for (i = 0 ; i < gridHeight ; i++)
	{
		for (j = 0 ; j < gridWidth ; j++)
			gridArray[i][j] = 0 ;
	}

	


	return 0;
}

As you see, not much for 2 hours

 

[badgermonkey]

Have it in a Grid / Game class and use the main method just to start playing the game.

What would I be messing around with in the class though?

 

[badgermonkey]

rudimentary AI won't be that hard to do, check all the valid moves, see how many in a tow each one gives and choose the highest sort of thing. TBH if it's taken you two hours to write that you probably need to set your sights a little lower unless it's a long term project.

Ah that took two hours because I spent a long time trying to work out how I'd go about doing this program. The actual code there took a couple of minutes to bang out, what I meant was 2 hours after picking up the problem to work on, that was all I've got



And yeah, basically it's first year programming, we've done classes, references, pointers and just recently done some inheritence. No matrices as yet.
So pretty basic