Lab 11: Adaptor and Decorator

The goal of this lab is to practice using the Adaptor pattern.

1. Initial setup

Copy the current version of the simulation code into your directory. This "current version" uses the strategy pattern for hunting, but the only supported strategy is the StupidStrategy.

cp -r /cslab.all/ubuntu/cs245/lab11/* .

2. Introduction

Evil Professor NenurdNav has prepared his own version of a predator-prey simulation for Lab 11 of his course CSCI 542. It is similar to ours conceptually, but all the code is different. It includes a class Snake, which has some interesting behavior:

• Snakes reproduce by laying an egg. It leaves an "egg" in a position, though the egg is invisible and does not prevent other agents (or as Prof NenurdNav calls them, "organisms") from entering that position. After a certain number of cycles, the egg hatches, and a new snake is placed in the position where the egg was. If that space is occupied by something else, the hatchling bites it and it dies, no matter what it is.
• Snakes can kill their predators, by biting them. They cannot eat their predators, though. A predator needs to be careful when attacking a snake.

You like this idea and want to plug this Snake class into our version of the simulation. However, it uses all different interfaces. You must use the adaptor pattern in order to make the Snake class work in our simulation.

3. Writing Adaptors

Your task here, after you have looked over the files and gotten a basic feel for how they work, has four parts:

1. The main part is to write an Adapter class for Snake. This class will have to be a subtype of Agent, but it is up to you whether it should be a subclass of Animal.
2. Snake, however, depends on Island instead of SimulationGrid and Organism instead of Agent You will need to write an Adaptor for Agent to make it look like an Organism. This should be fairly easy.
3. Wrapping SimulationGrid, however, is more complicated. For one thing, Island has methods that take not just a pair of coordinates, but a pair of coordinates plus a distance and direction, indicating the position which is the given distance away from the given coordinates, in the given direction.
   The other complication is that putOrganism() receives an Organism as a parameter, but it must put an Agent into the grid. The Organism might be a Snake, in which case it must be wrapped; it might be an adapted Agent, in which case it must be unwrapped; or it might be null, in which case nothing needs to happen, except that the compiler must be satisfied that you're using the right types.
4. Finally, you will need to adapt PreyArbitor for the PredatorDeterminer interface. This is trickier because PreyArbitor is used only for static purposes, whereas a Snake expects a PredatorDeterminer object.

With all this wrapping and unwrapping of Snakes, you should make sure that you do not create multiple SnakeAdaptor instances for the same Snake instance. I recommend having a private static HashMap in SnakeAdaptor which associates Snakes and their adaptors. Have a static method in SnakeAdaptor which takes a Snake and stands in for a constructor: if the Snake is not in the HashMap, then make a new adaptor for it; otherwise, return the old adaptor you already made.

4. Testing

To test your changes, you will need to make some modifications to predprey.dat to put Snake (or your adaptor) into the predator/prey relation.

5. Turn in

Turn in a hardcopy of the classes you wrote.