Reading week === Some idea about assignment 2

Since it is reading week and no class is in progress, I do spend some time working on assignment 2. Personally I think the biggest difference between assignment 1 and 2 is that subtract square is a text-base game while tippy is a graphic-base game. Of course the computer cannot understand the graph of board or how those circle and cross on the board form shapes. Then that means we need to work to "translate" the graph to the text.

My idea of that is to use number representing each block. For example, a 3 x 3 block may looks like this:

 and the program may interpret each block as a number:

so when the player want to choose a block to occupy, he or she actually choose a number from 1 to 9 to represent the block.

Then mechanism of deciding winner goes a little bit more complicate. There are generally four patterns of winning situation:

OOX    n, n+1

XOO    n+size+1, n+size+2

XXX    

OXX    n

OOX    n+size, n+size+1

XOX    n+2*size+1

XOX    n

OOX    n+size-1, n+size

OXX    n+2size-1

XOO    n, n+1

OOX    n+size-1, n+size

XXX

* size is a variable means the length of each row.

Imagine this, player 1 choose a move for four times, all his or her moves are recorded in a list, we sort the list and see if the four numbers match the pattern of the four numbers I listed above. However, we need to avoid the situation which like this:

XOO   

XXO

OXX   

It also follows the pattern (first block = n, second block = n+1, third block = n+size+1, fourth block = n+size+2), and from this we see that the first block cannot not be larger than n*size-2, in other words:

a//size or (a+1)//size would return a False.

These things are just conceptual level, but I think it is practical and is able to change to code.