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A take-home interview question: scoring a game of 10-pin bowling

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Fred's Bowl-O-Rama

Hi there! This is a simple (unfinished) Rails project, a score-keeping app for a bowling alley, Fred's Bowl-O-Rama. When you've finished, this app must accept POST requests to /scores, containing JSON-formatted bowling frames (each player fills a frame each turn), and respond with a scoreboard containing each player's name, their score, and the name of the winner of the game.

Some things to keep in mind for the coding challenge:

  • Feel free to write any tests for your code you find necessary. The RSpec tests provided are provided for your reference.
  • We provide a couple of tests in spec/; read them to get an idea of what inputs your endpoint should accept.
  • Make sure to handle not only happy paths but also invalid requests, requests with improperly formatted data, etc. Your service should return a 400 status for any malformed input, a 422 response for any input that is well-formed but cannot be processed (i.e. if someone scores 31 in a single frame).
  • Use the same route and controller endpoint and API specified here, so that the test suite will still pass.
  • Comment your code more liberally than you normally would, so we can learn more about your thought process and decisions you made writing the code.
  • We say this should take 1-2 hours because we don't want to take up more of your time than that, but feel free to spend as much time on it as you need.
  • If you need to, add additional libraries to the Gemfile or more files to the project. All dependencies must install with bundle install and all tests must run with rake spec.
  • Remember that the tests provided here aren't the only tests that might get run against your code.

Scoring rules

For each frame of the game, each player takes a turn bowling. If they knock over 10 pins on their first throw of the frame (a strike), their score for that frame includes those 10 points and additionally any points scored on the next two throws--whether or not those occur within the same frame.

If their two throws in a single frame knock over all the pins (a spare), their score for that frame includes the 10 points from those two throws, and additionally any points scored on the next throw--again, whether or not that throw occurs within the same frame.

If the player fails to knock down all ten pins with two throws, only the total number of pins they knocked down that frame are recorded. Note that if a player gets a strike on the first throw of a frame, that is the only throw allowed for that frame, except if it's the last frame.

To score the last frame, as many as three throws are recorded depending on what happens. If, in the last frame, the player throws a strike the first throw, they can bowl two more times for that frame, so that there are two throws scored after the strike. In this way, the last frame can be as many as 30 points.

See these links for more information on bowling scoring:

Input format

The JSON format for scoring requests can include any number of players and up to ten frames per player. Each frame is an array of integers representing the numbers of pins knocked down for each throw. According to the rules of 10-pin bowling, a frame can contain 1, 2, or 3 throws. Here is an example payload:

{
  "Ralf Hütter": [
    [1, 3],
    [10]
  ],
  "Florian Schneider": [
    [7, 3],
    [0, 0]
  ]
}

In this partial game of only two frames so far, Ralf took a turn and bowled 1 and 3 pins over, then Florian took a turn and bowled 7 and 3 pins over (a spare), then Ralf bowled a strike, then finally Florian threw his ball immediately into the gutter twice.

For a scoring request to be valid, in addition to following the format above, the following conditions must also be true:

  • All players must have bowled the same number of frames
  • No player may bowl too many throws (i.e., more than 2, more than 3 on the final frame, bowling a strike then throwing again)
  • Except in the final (10th) frame, no player may knock over more than 10 pins in a single frame (though a player may score more points than 10 in a frame, if they bowl a strike or spare).

Output format

The response body should also be JSON-encoded, as an object with two keys: scores, and winner. scores should be an object with player names as keys and their total score from all frames as values; winner should just be a string, the winning player's name.

{
  "scores": {
    "Hannibal Smith": 300,
    "B. A. Baracus": 276,
    "Templeton Peck": 190,
    "H. M. Murdock": 110
  },
  "winner": "Hannibal Smith"
}

If there are two or more winning players with the same score, winner should be concatenated:

{
  "scores": {
    "Reed Richards": 276,
    "Susan Storm": 276,
    "Johnny Storm": 190,
    "Ben Grimm": 110
  },
  "winner": "Reed Richards & Susan Storm"
}

Note: the players do not have to be listed in any particular order.

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