COMP3211 Project Description

In this project, you are going to design a program to compete in a series

of auctions.
General setting
1. Each auction is a single item best price auction.
2. If your program wins the auction, it'll be rewarded with
1-b points, where b is its bid. If it lose,
then it gets 0 point.
3. Your program's score will be the sum of all auctions that it participated in.
4. You will be told at the beginning:
a) whether the auctions will be held for exactly K times, for a given K,
or for an unknown number of times;
b) whether there is a bidder RANDOM who will bid randomly;
c) whether the number of bidders is known;
d) whether all bidders and their bids will be announced after each auction
or just the winner and the winning bid would be announced;
e) the set of allowable bids;
5. Your program has up to 10 seconds to send in its bid.
Specifically, you can assume that the current directory has the
following files, which you can access at runtime:
setup.txt:
line 1: a number denoting the number of bidders. 0 means unknown.
line 2: 1 or 0. 1 means there is a random bidder;
line 3: a number denoting the number of auctions. 0 means unlimited;
line 4: 1 or 0. 1 means that all bids are announced, and 0 means only
the winner and its bid is announced;
line 5: either [0,1], meaning all numbers between 0 and 1 are allowed,
or {a,b,c,...,d}, meaning that only elements in the sets are
allowed as bids;
result.txt:
initially empty, after each round, it will be appended with the following
information:
round $X
$ID1, $Bid1
$ID2, $Bid2
...
end of round $X
where $X is a number, $IDk is bidder k's ID, and $Bidk its bid.
The first bidder, $ID1, is the winner of the round.
The ID for RANDOM will be 00. We will use your student number
as the ID of your program. If a bidder sends in an illegal bid, like
bids 0 when the set of allowable bids is {0.3,0.6}, then its bid will
be recorded as "-1". If a program does not send in any bid, then its
bid will be recorded as "-". If all bidders in a round either sent in
illegal bids or did not send in any bid, then there will be no winner
in the round, and this will be indicated by "-" on the first line.
For example, the following entries:
round 2
01, 0.3
02, 0.2

03, 04, -1
end of round 2
round 3
01, 02, 03, 04, -1
end of round 3
mean that at round #2, bidder 01 was
bidder 02 bid 0.2, bidder 03 did not
in an illegal bid. However, at round
received was from bidder 04, but the

the winner with the winning bid 0.3,

sent in any bid, and bidder 04 sent
#3, there is no winner as the only bid
bid was illegal.

On each run, your program needs to return with your bid by writing to
standard output (e.g. "cout << " in C++). It needs to do so in 10 seconds,
otherwise, it will be aborted.
In addition to the above two files, your program can create and
access your own files. For example, you may want to have a file to record
historic bids by other programs. To avoid conflicts, name these files as:
my_file1_ID, my_file2_ID, etc., where ID is your student number.
However, your program is not allowed to alter other people's files.
Furthermore, your program will not have access to files in other
directories and have no access to internet.
Submission
Due time: 11:59pm on Sunday, Apr 19, 2015.
Submit your project through our online assignment collection system
https://course.cse.ust.hk/cass
Submit it by making a zip archive of all your files. The archive need to include
your bidder that is executable on lab 2 machines. Please name your
archive as "ID.zip" and your bidder as "ID", where ID is your student number.
Grading
Your program will be graded according to how it was written
and how well it competed against other programs. In addition to your
program, you should also submit a report describing the algorithm
used by your program. We will at least run your program pairwise against
each of the others including RANDOM with the following settings:
1. unknown number of auctions;
2. all bids are announced after each auction;
3. the following sets of allowable bids:
[0,1]
{0.3,0.6} (prisoner's dilemma)
{0.3,0.6,0.7} (exactly one Nash equilibrium)
{0.3,0.6,0.9} (two Nash equilibria)
{0,1/100000,...,99999/100000,1}
Notice that if your program sends in a bid that is not allowed, for
example, bids 0 when the allowed bids are {0.3,0.6}, then you'll
get -1 for that auction.

TBD: Optionally, after we have finished running the competition,

we may announce three top bidders, and ask you to submit a revised
version of your program. We will then run your new bidder against
the three top bidders.