In this game, two players sit in front of a pile of 100 stones. They take turns, each removing between 1 and 5 stones (assuming there are at least 5 stones left in the pile). The person who removes the last stone(s) wins.
Write a program to play this game. This may seem tricky, so break it down into parts. Like many programs, we have to use nested loops (one loop inside another).
In the outermost loop, we want to keep playing until we are out of stones.
Inside that, we want to keep alternating players. You have the option of either writing two blocks of code, or keeping a variable that tracks the current player. The second way is slightly trickier since we haven't learned lists yet, but it's definitely do-able!
Finally, we might want to have an innermost loop that checks if the user's input is valid. Is it a number? Is it a valid number (e.g. between 1 and 5)? Are there enough stones in the pile to take off this many? If any of these answers are no, we should tell the user and re-ask them the question.
So, the basic outline of the program should be something like this:
TOTAL = 100
MAX = 5
pile = TOTAL # all stones are in the pile to start
while [pile is not empty]:
while [player 1's answer is not valid]:
[ask player 1]
[check player 1's input... is it valid?]
[same as above for player 2]
Note how the important numbers 100 and 5 are stored in a single variable at the top. This is good practice -- it allows you to easily change the constants of a program. For example, for testing, you may want to start with only 15 or 20 stones.
Be careful with the validity checks. Specifically, we want to keep asking player 1 for their choice as long as their answer is not valid, BUT we want to make sure we ask them at least ONCE. So, for example, we will want to keep a variable that tracks whether their answer is valid, and set it to False initially.
When you're finished, test each other's programs by playing them!
stones = 100
while stones > 0:
if stones > 5:
player1 = int(input('player 1 make a move: '))
if 0 < player1 < 6:
stones -= player1
print(str(stones) + ' left')
player2 = int(input('player 2 make a move: '))
if 0 < player2 < 6:
stones -= player2
print(str(stones) + ' left')
else:
print('invalid input')
else:
print('invalid input')
else:
print('only ' + str(stones) + ' stones left')
player1 = int(input('player 1 make a move: '))
if player1 <= stones:
stones -= player1
print(str(stones) + ' left')
if stones == 0:
print('player 1 wins')
player2 = int(input('player 2 make a move: '))
if player2 <= stones:
stones -= player2
print(str(stones) + ' left')
if stones == 0:
print('player 1 wins')
else:
print('invalid input')
else:
print('invalid input')