Engineering Projects/Poppit/Howard Community College/Fall2011/550 fke

Going to do

 * Is there one specific strategy that would pop balloons better than the average student player?

Team Members

 * K
 * E
 * F

Summary
As a group we played 100 games of the Google chrome game Poppit and recorded our averages using different chunking methods. Chunking methods are different solutions used to pop every balloon in the game; popping every balloon is winning the game, not just making all the prizes drop. Using trial and error we decided on a method that gave the the best results on average. The average was taken by adding all the balloons left after each game and dividing by the number of games played.

Material List

 * Google Chrome
 * Engineer's notebook

Software List

 * Poppit add-on for Google Chrome

Time

 * 2-5 minutes per game
 * Collectively played 100 games

Tutorials
A few tips our team developed while chunking the poppit game are as follows:
 * Play the game a few times BEFORE thinking of possible strategies. This helps you get a feel for the game before brainstorming and produces more playable strategies.
 * Play LOTS of games. Just because a strategy may produce on good score or may pop all of the balloons, doesn't mean it is a good strategy. We recommend that at least 10 games be played in order to find a good average balloon count after the game.
 * Develop more basic/simple strategies before diving too deep into a game plan. Put together patterns that lead to good results and combined them into one strategy later.

Strategies tested
The strategies that were used to gather information included: Conclusion: The undo button was critical as it allowed the player to make sure that when a group of balloons were popped, the orientation of another group of balloons was not affected thus making it possible to pop more balloons and eventually reaching the ultimate goal. Another realization was that popping the bottom balloons first cannot really affect the orientation of the groups of balloons. So we believe that if there was a strategy to win the game every single time, it would start from the bottom of the stack. Many of the strategies led to winning the game according to Poppit rules; however until now, the team has not figured out a fully successful strategy in which all the balloons were popped.
 * Row by row all the way down and vice versa
 * Column by column from right to left and vice versa
 * Popping consecutive groups of balloons in one row then popping one column
 * Popping the smallest groups of balloons first in order to pile up large groups of balloons
 * Popping the largest groups of balloons first then moving on
 * Popping color by color
 * Popping two rows than two columns

Next Steps
Our next steps to further the Poppit project would include
 * Compare our averages to the overall average of the group
 * Compare which chunking method worked the best on average
 * Keep testing strategies
 * Once the best method is discovered, tweek it more by alternating working from bottom to top or small chunks to big chunks, etc.
 * Write code for Poppit