CS310 Team Lab #10
More MATLAB Programming Practice
Programming

OBJECTIVES

• In this team lab you will get more practice programming in MATLAB.

INTRODUCTION

The Game of Nim

Nim is a game involving piles of objects (often matches, sticks, or stones) and two players who take turns removing some of the objects from one of the piles. In some versions of the game, the player who takes the last object wins; in other versions, the winner is the player who avoids taking the last object.

In this problem you will write an interactive MATLAB version of the game of Nim. In the version that you will be writing

• there is one pile of sticks
• the pile starts out with a size that is a random (integer) number between 50 and 100 (inclusive)
• players take turns removing one or more sticks from the pile
• a player must remove at least one stick but can remove no more than half of the pile
• the winner will be the player who avoids taking the last stick

This team lab will give you experience writing code with more complicated control flow, writing and using functions, and handling user input. Your program will consist of several functions and a main script that runs everything. They are:

• printPile - a function which prints the pile in a nice format
• checkValue - a function which checks the validity of the user input
• getPlayerChoice - a function which asks a player for the number of sticks to remove
• nim - the main script

The problems will lead you through the implementation of the game of Nim.