Conclusion

The game of Blackjack has given us an opportunity to further extend and modify a simulation application with a considerable number of classes and objects. These exercises gave us an opportunity to work from a base of software, extending and refining our design.

We omitted concluding exercises which would integrate this package with the Simulator and collect statistics. This step, while necessary, doesn’t include many interesting design decisions. The final deliverable should be a working application that parses command-line parameters, creates the required objects, and creates an instance of Simulator to collect data.

We have specifically omitted delving into the glorious details of specific player strategies. We avoided these details because there are so many. We’ve left it to the interested student to either buy any of the available books on Blackjack or download strategy descriptions from the Internet.

Indeed, one of the more interesting things this simulation can be used for is to create a machine learning environment. An approach like Simulated Annealing could be used to try different strategy variations looking for one that’s optimal.

Next Steps. There are a number of logical next steps for the programmers looking to build skills in object-oriented design. We’ll split these along several broad fronts.

• Additional Technology. There are several technology directions that can be pursued for further design experience.

  Another area for building skills in design is the implementation of programs that make extensive use of a database. All of the statistical results can be accumulated in a database instead of .csv files for analysis.

  A graphical user interface GUI can be added to show that the simulation is doing something.

  A web framework can be used to provide configuration changes and run simulations. Rather than using the command line, a RESTful API can be built to provide alternative strategies or rules.

• Application Areas. We selected simulation because it’s part of the historical foundation for object-oriented programming. We selected casino games because they have a reasonable level of complexity.

  Clearly, numerous other application areas can be selected as the basis for problems. The number and variety of human endevors that can be automated is quite large.

  Moving beyond simulation or doing simulation on something more complex than a casino table game is a good next step.

• Additional Depth in Design Patterns. It’s possible to use additional and different design patterns to extend and refine the application that you have built.

  Any book or web site on OO design patterns will provide numerous examples of patterns. These can be used for add flexibility to these casino game simulators.

Looking Forward

The final part has some overall “fit-and-finish” topics. We’ll look at a number of tools useful for quality assurance. After that, we’ll look at the overall command-line interface for running the application.