# Fibs

Originally posted March 7, 2014

Recently, I've been addicted to the game Threes. Go check it out; the gameplay is rather simple, so I won't bother reexplaining it here.

One of the things I found interesting about the game was its scoring system. The scoring system works like this: for every tile 3 * 2^n, you are awarded 3^n points. It's sort of the equivalent of writing your number in (broken) base 2, and then reinterpreting it as base 3. Gameplay wise, this system guarantees that combining two tiles will yield a score that is greater than the original.

This had me thinking about another base system: the Fibonacci base system, which is explained more thoroughly than you could ever ask for here. The Fibonacci base system represents numbers not as sums of powers of the base, but instead as sums of Fibonacci numbers. For example, 13 can be represented as 10110_{Fib} - (8 * 1) + (5 * 0) + (3 * 1) + (2 * 1) + (1 * 0). Representations are not unique: 10110_{Fib} = 11000_{Fib} = 100000_{Fib}. However, if you impose the restriction that you cannot have two consecutive 1s, then there is a unique representation.

Well, I had the idea: why not play Threes, except that instead of "overflowing" base 2 representation, you overflow the Fibonacci representation by combining two adjacent Fibonacci numbers?

So I went and coded the game, which you can find on Github. You can play it on the command line with python fibs.py

A few lessons / observations about my code:

I used a functional style, where the board object was an immutable tuple of tuples. This lack of mutability meant that I could make virtual moves without worrying about having to backtrack a move.

def is_valid(move, board):
return board == EMPTY_BOARD or move_dispatch[move](board, EMPTY) != board
def check_loss(board):
return not any(is_valid(move, board) for move in move_dispatch)


I used a lot of precomputed globals. It occurs to me that precomputed globals are essentially cached function calls.

# A list of fibonacci numbers. Should be impossible to get a piece bigger than this.
FIBS = fibonacci_gen(3 * BOARD_SIZE**2)
# scoring at the end: F_n yields 2**n points.
SCORES = {fib : 2**i for i, fib in enumerate(FIBS)}
# special case for combining 1 + 1 = 2
COMBOS = {(1,1) : 2}
# normal case: F_{n-2} + F_{n-1} = F_n
COMBOS.update({(FIBS[i], FIBS[i+1]) : FIBS[i+2] for i in range(len(FIBS) - 2)})
COMBOS.update({(FIBS[i+1], FIBS[i]) : FIBS[i+2] for i in range(len(FIBS) - 2)})


Rotating and un-rotating a board meant that I only had to write one copy of move_left(board, next_piece), and fewer places for me to introduce bugs. Again, using a functional style meant that I could freely rotate the board while not accidentally rotating other existant copies of the board.

def rotateCW(board): return tuple(map(tuple, zip(*board[::-1])))
def rotate180(board): return rotateCW(rotateCW(board))
def rotateCCW(board): return rotateCW(rotateCW(rotateCW(board)))

def move_left(board, next_piece):
#....(implementation)....
def move_up(board, next_piece):
return rotateCW(move_left(rotateCCW(board), next_piece))
def move_up(board, next_piece):
return rotateCW(move_left(rotateCCW(board), next_piece))
def move_down(board, next_piece):
return rotateCCW(move_left(rotateCW(board), next_piece))


I learned a bunch about python string templating / formatting. Apparently python has a very extensive API for printing fixed width columns that are left-adjusted, etc., or maybe you want to convert ints to floats with 2 decimal points, etc...

Writing an iterator over the board made it super convenient to score the board at the end and to figure out the largest element in the board.

def board_iter(board):
'Iterates over nonempty elements of the board'
return (item for row in board for item in row if item != EMPTY)
def score_board(board):
return sum(SCORES[num] for num in board_iter(board))


Python's terminal interface is apparently buffered, so there's no getchar() like in C. Well, there is, but stdin only receives all the characters at once when you hit enter. I found some voodoo code online that "fixes" the issue at the cost of also breaking whatever signal handler exists for ctrl+c. Maybe this is why git / manpages / other interactive terminal programs require the manual 'q' for escaping, instead of letting ctrl+C work.