Designing the Game Board

Using the REPL we can experiment with different ways to model the game board.

How to represent a cell

A cell is either going to be empty, or contain a nought or cross. For simplicity, we will start with three keywords

:empty
:nought
:cross

Representing the whole board

We could just hard code the board as a vector of rows, with each row being a vector. In this example we set all the board cells to :empty

[[:empty :empty :empty]
   [:empty :empty :empty]
   [:empty :empty :empty]]

Generating a data structure to represet the game board

To create a row is simple to do using the repeat function to generate 3 :empty keywords and return them as a list

(repeat 3 :empty)

To make this a vector we can just wrap that in a vec function

(vec (repeat 3 :empty))

To create three rows we just repeat the code above 3 times

(vec (repeat 3 (vec (repeat 3 :empty))))

We can use the above code in a function and replace 3 with a local name that takes the value of the argument passed in so lets write a game-board function.

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If you need a quick break while modeling your game board, here is a very silly distraction

{% youtube %} https://youtu.be/0h9jN12QbdE