[Cs5500] Avatar Failed

[Karl Lieberherr]

Hi Madhu:

interesting. The avatar is a black box to us. It gets a request and we
expect a timely response. If the response is untimely, we should say so.
If we get a response, we analyze it carefully.
If it does not parse, we tell them the first error.
If it parses, but a proposed claim is illegal, we tell them which.
if not all claims are opposed, ...
if a provided instance does not belong to the instance set, ...
...

Please can you check that all those issues are properly blamed.

This is a high priority issue because if the students don't get targeted
feedback,
debugging becomes much more difficult. I have opened a discussion group.

http://blackboard.neu.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=null&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_671472_1%26url%3D

-- Karl

On Sun, Nov 6, 2011 at 9:21 PM, Madhuvanthi Balasubramanian <
balasubramanian.m at husky.neu.edu> wrote:

> Professor,
>
>     I agree that the current message is a little too ambiguous. I checked
> the method that throws this message. This method gets Bob's response for
> Alice's request, and is enclosed in a try-catch block. The message " cannot
> handle invalid request" comes from the catch block that catches exceptions
> of the type "Exception" and nothing narrower than that. So I assume this is
> used to catch any kind of exception that the response from Bob can throw.
> One of them is thrown when the avatars take too long to respond. There may
> also be others such as nullpointer exceptions. So I am not sure how to
> generalize this message. Could we add an additional statement that says
> "Please check to make sure your solve method handles all kinds of
> instances" ?
>
>
> On Sun, Nov 6, 2011 at 9:09 PM, Karl Lieberherr <lieber at ccs.neu.edu>wrote:
>
>> Hi Madhu:
>>
>> thank you for checking that. We should strive for a good blame assignment
>> and say:
>> "avatar took too long to respond" in this case?!
>>
>> -- Karl
>>
>> On Sun, Nov 6, 2011 at 8:42 PM, Madhuvanthi Balasubramanian <
>> balasubramanian.m at husky.neu.edu> wrote:
>>
>>> Greg,
>>>       Your avatar may have taken a long time to respond to the
>>> claims/instances from the other avatar. This is one reason it may have been
>>> kicked out for the reason "avatar cannot handle valid request".
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sun, Nov 6, 2011 at 7:49 PM, Karl Lieberherr <lieber at ccs.neu.edu>wrote:
>>>
>>>> Question from Greg.
>>>>
>>>> Should we improve the messages?
>>>>
>>>> -- Karl
>>>>
>>>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>>>> From: Greg I Kerr <kerr.g at husky.neu.edu>
>>>> Date: Sun, Nov 6, 2011 at 3:47 PM
>>>> Subject: Avatar Failed
>>>> To: Karl Lieberherr <lieber at ccs.neu.edu>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> When we tried to play the game our avatar was kicked out, but I am not
>>>> sure what the history means exactly. It doesn't say a specific reason we
>>>> were kicked out.
>>>>
>>>> Any idea?
>>>>
>>>> Thanks,
>>>>
>>>> Greg
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>>  Thanks
>>> - Madhu
>>>
>>>
>>
>
>
> --
>  Thanks
> - Madhu
>
>
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