Well, since I never post anything meaningful, I thought I'd show you guys something I made for my final project in Neural Networks at my final year of college. (Keep in mind I hate college, and carry no huge amount of pride in this project.)

Anyways, the basic premise is this. You play blackjack versus a dealer (or optionally, you can watch 2 neural networks duke it out versus the dealer) with a set rule. The dealer will hit if he has less than 17, and stand if he has more than 17, and more than or equal to your total. Player 1 is a reinforcement learning neural network(buzzword!!) that has been trained 10,000 iterations before the game even starts. You play as player 2 and try to keep up.

Knowing the odds of the game of blackjack, this came out pretty interesting really. Maybe its boring to you guys, I mean...its just blackjack.

Oh, and yes, I hand made all the cards...the Queen card has my face on it, and the King card has my partners face on it.

Download here: Blackjack

Screenshot: http://www.zerolust.com/flecko/files/blackjack.png

And YESSS...the source is included. As well as our presentation slides...if you're interested. Anywho, let me know what you guys think of it.

Lastly, no whining abut the download size, the fact that I didn't use packfiles, or that I included the allegro dll. Its 880k, suck it up.

And thanks everyone for keeping the allegro community alive, I love this place.
-Flecko

Man, i'm sorry it didn't run well kazzmir. I normally use Dev-cpp for my stuff...so I'm more ANSI compatible, but my partner used msvc for all his NN code (I did the allegro stuff) and he did use some rather sloppy-ish code that led to hours of debugging on my part.

So I take it you're running under linux and can't get it to run?

My linux partition was recently hacked (thats what I get for running an old kernel) so I was planning on building/testing it this weekend.

Is there anyone who is running winows and can just test the included exe?

Don't worry, I haven't forgotenn our gcc* bretheren, I just have a boatload of finals to take tomorrow.
Rock on,
-Flecko

for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) { ... }
for (i = ...

is not a "terrible coding practice". It is legacy from the days before C++ was standardised. And yes, MSVC 6 accepts that code and rejects the 'correct' alternative.

If you use MSVC 6, or you think your users might, you can get around it with

#define for if (0) ; else for

Maybe the neural network also gauges what risk to take according to the other player's situation. I don't know the rules.

"19." "Hit me." "20." "Hit me." "21." "Hit me." "22."

"D'oh!"

There is nothing wrong with this. Since in C++ you can declare variables anywhere (doesn't have to be the first statements in a function). If you declare it again in the second for you get an error. It's really not a big deal.

Guys, read his first post. The dealer doesn't use a neural network, is the other player who uses a neural network for tha AI. And it plays quite well. I played this last night and IIRC the dealer won 18, the NN AI won 36 and I won 38.

A block is noted by { }, and since the initialization isn't inside the for loops { }, it's not part of the for loop.

Doesn't it assume that RAND_MAX*52 fits in int range? It doesn't have to work if it's not true although idea is better than % operator.

And this code is perfectly fine:

for(int i=0;i<10;i++)
  for(int i=0;i<10;i++)
    for(int i=0;i<10;i++)
      for(int i=0;i<10;i++)
        for(int i=0;i<10;i++)
          do_something_100000_times();

This is fine for me. I know that you are supposed to use 0 in C++, but NULL is much more readable and it would be really surprising if NULL wasn't defined as 0.

yup, the problem comes when you do this:

for (int i=0; i<10; i++)
    do_something();

for (int i=0; i<10; i++)
    do_something();

it should compile, but it doesn't with MSVC6.

Problem is, if you try this:

for (int i=0; i<10; i++)
    do_something();

for (i=0; i<10; i++)
    do_something();

Now it won't compile with mingw:

 name lookup of `i' changed for new ISO `for' scoping
   using obsolete binding at `i'

It seems that best solution is to just use:

int i;

for (i=0; i<10; i++)
    do_something();

for (i=0; i<10; i++)
    do_something();

Or, having read the thread like good little boys, you would have seen the#define for if(0); else for, Which causes the variable to be in it's own scope.

That wouldn't kill MSVC6 because each one is in the next scope, right?

What I'm seeing is MSVC6 doing this:

{
/*scopeA*/

for(int x, ...) //x is a part of scopeA
{
/*scopeB*/
for(int y, ...){ /*scopeC*/} //y is a part of scopeB
}

}

Is that correct?

Well... true. Unless if you apply the patches that have been around for years. In which case, MSVC6 works fine with the exception of C99 support (which it never had to begin with). Unless I'm forgetting something.

Its still way out of date. And is likely out of MSs support phase.

Ah, the patches solve that? I know it fails with an unpatched MSVC, but I never tried it again, when I updated.