EEL 358 - Operating Systems, Fall 2006

The objective of this assignment is to let you gain some hands on experience in Unix process creation and communication. You have to simulate a shooting game with N players and a moderator. This will also make you familiar with key signalling and concurrent program design.

Consider following scenario

A moderator and N players;

The moderator decides which player fights whom;

Only two players fight each other at a time;

(1) The moderator creates N players.

(2) All the created players are waiting for opponent information in the beginning.

(3) The moderator decides the opponents and informs them to start fighting by sending the opponent information.

(4) The opponents shoot at each other at some random time after they receive the opponent information.

(5) The player who gets shot first, informs the moderator before dying.

(6) The player alive waits for the moderator to send the next opponent information.

(7) The game proceeds in the same manner with all the players until only one player remains (the winner).

In effect, this is a tournament organized by the moderator;

Instructions

(1) Your job is to implement the above scenario as an interaction between processes.

(2) Initially, the moderator creates players. Here, it gets the number of players from the user.

(3) The opponent information content (sent by the moderator to the players at the start of the fight) is to be decided by you.

(4) Set a reasonable random time before the player shoots. A maximum of 5 to 10 seconds would be fine.

(5) Make sure that the game proceeds like a tournament.

　

Implementation

POSIX compliant C threads Library

Hints

(1) The moderator is the parent process that creates the child processes (players);

(2) Sending opponent information to players ® IPC;

(3) Shooting another player ® signal from one process to another;

(4) Dying ® process being killed;

(5) N can be even or odd;

Sample Instruction and Output

Enter the number of players (N):

　

4

　

Player 1 with PID 3216 created.

Player 2 with PID 3217 created.

Player 3 with PID 3218 created.

Player 4 with PID 3219 created.

　

Parent message: player 1 and 2 to fight.

　

Player 1 message: I have been shot.

　

Parent message: player 1 dead.

　

Parent message: player 3 and 4 to fight.

　

Player 3 message: I have been shot.

　

Parent message: player 3 dead.

　

Parent message: player 2 and 4 to fight.

　

Player 4 message: I have been shot.

　

Parent message: player 4 dead.

　

Parent message: Player 2 is the winner.

Make sure you distinguish messages from parent and child processes in the output.

4. Clarity, Formatting and General Layout ® Up to -10% if not followed
5. Originality ® Both copier and originator gets ZERO
6. Late Policy ® 20% reduction, allows ONLY one day delay.