Read memory from own process in Java

I'm current attending a course where we have to write an AI to play battleships, and we managed to put out a great working one, but our teacher is a smartass and I'd like to make a cheating AI, that reads the memory and looks where the opponent AI has开发者_如何学JAVA placed the ships.

The UI is running in a separate thread, where it runs an observer pattern on the logic in the main thread. The positions of the ships is stored in a binary two-dimensional array where true represents a point on a ship (not which, just any ship).

Now the question is: Is it possible to read the memory of the two-dimensional array of enemyBoard somehow, when it is running in the same process and in the same thread?

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If it's in the same process and your classes have any kind of link to the driver (and thus indirectly to the other array), you could obtain it using only the reflection API.

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One way of doing this would be to call out to a piece of native C/C++ code that uses the JNI interface to copy the array contents from the heap. JNI offers a number of methods for reading/copying and manipulating objects on the heap. The official documentation is a good place to start.

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You can have direct access to the memory only if you dive to the native code. So, I suppose, the only way to do that is a JNI call.

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In Java you don't have raw access to the memory in the same way you do in C/C++. So you could try and use JNI to get at the raw memory.

Another option may be to use reflection. If your code has a reference to whatever object has the opponents positions then you can access it's fields, even the private ones.