Hello, I'm desperate for help.
I'm a first year uni student at Swinburne studying Information Technology.
One of the subjects I do is C programming. I have never done any programming
before and found that the pace that they are going through at uni is too
much for me to fully comprehend. I'm having trouble analysing this problem
I have been given and turing it into C code. A description of the problem
is below;
***
I am to write a program to play the well-known game of Nim. The game starts
with some number of stones in a pile. The players ( 2 players A (computer)
and B (you) ) take turns removing either one or two stones at each move.
The player who takes the last stone loses.

The program should use the following optimal strategy for Nim: take the
remainder on dividing the stones left by 3; this will be 0, 1 or 2. If it
is 0, then take 2 stones; if it is 2, take 1 stone. If the remainder is 1
then the game cannot be won, assuming the opponent is also playing the 
optimal strategy; however the program should delay the inevitable and take
one more stone ( perhaps the other player will make a mistake ).

The program should start by asking the user for the number of stones to play
with, and then asks who moves first (0=program, 1=user). It then runs in a 
loop, alternating turns between the program and the user. The program chooses
one or two stones according to the above strategy, and then asks  the user
how many stones she/he wishes to take. When the number of stones reaches zero
the program annonces the winner.

The program should check for errors:
initial number of stones must be greater than 0;
"who moves first" must be 0 or 1;
number of stones removed be user at each move must be one or two, and not 
more than the number remaining.
If an error is detected, the program should output an appropiate error 
message and repeat the input request. For this exercise, I was told it is
not necessary to check for non-numeric input, bu useful.***

Please, if anybody out there is willing to help, give advice or start me
on the right track I will be ever so grateful.

Cheers, Ben.

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peteshim{at}melbpc.org.au
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... RAM = Rarely Adequate Memory  

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