Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Wacky Ideas

Tic-Tac-Toe In T-SQL

Published 2018-08-13 by Kevin Feasel

Riley Major continues his series on tic-tac-toe:

We could give it some smarts. For example, we know that in our game, we can only choose X or O, so we could put a data constraint on the Play column. And we know that in our game, you can’t play on the same space more than once, so we could put a unique constraint on the combination of GameID and Position. You could even be really creative and enforce our game’s alternating player moves by putting a data constraint on the Player column such that it equaled 1 when (Turn Modulo 2) equaled 1 and 2 otherwise. (Really it wouldn’t need to be a data column at that point, just a calculated column.)

But imposing those restrictions robs our data structure from its raison d’être. It’s no longer a general purpose game play storage system; it only works for our game.

Instead of saddling the data storage itself with all of those rules, we could enforce all of the game mechanics through our data interpretation and manipulation logic. When we saved a game move, we could make sure that an X or O was played and it could check to see whether the specified square was already used. When we analyzed a game to determine a win, all of the criteria could be housed in that consuming query. But this flexible design isn’t done inflicting its complexity on us.

Riley covers a number of T-SQL features in the process of this post.

Comments closed

Tic-Tac-Toe In T-SQL

Published 2018-05-29 by Kevin Feasel

Riley Major implements Tic-Tac-Toe in T-SQL:

It turns out there’s a concept called bitmasking which can work a lot like this cardboard cut-out process. (Props to Dylan Beattie for his quick visual demonstration at NDC Minnesota which drove this point home.) First, you represent your game state with a bunch of bits (“OXOOOXXXX” yields “0100011110” for our example above, remembering that we’re padding that last 0 just to make the powers 1-based instead of 0-based) and then you represent your winning state with a bunch of bits (“0000001110” for our example winning state here). Now you use the magic of “bitwise math” to compare the two.

For our use, we want to find out whether our mask exposes the winning three bits. We want to block everything else out. With bits, to check if both items are true, you use “AND” (0 and 0 is 0; 0 and 1 is 0; 1 and 1 is 1). If we apply that “AND” concept to each bit in our game, it will squash out any values which don’t match. If what we have left matches the mask (fills in all of the space we can see through), then we have a match and a win.

The twist in all of this is that the end result doesn’t quite work as expected, but it was interesting watching the process.  That said, there’s a good reason why we don’t use T-SQL as a primary language for development…

Comments closed

Tupper’s Self-Referential Formula In Postgres

Published 2018-02-07 by Kevin Feasel

Lukas Eder has a fun post on Tupper’s self-referential formula:

Luckily, this syntax also happens to be SQL syntax, so we’re almost done. So, let’s try plotting this formula for the area of x BETWEEN 0 AND 105 and y BETWEEN k AND k + 16, where k is just some random large number, let’s say

96093937991895888497167296212785275471500433966012930665
15055192717028023952664246896428421743507181212671537827
70623355993237280874144307891325963941337723487857735749
82392662971551717371699516523289053822161240323885586618
40132355851360488286933379024914542292886670810961844960
91705183454067827731551705405381627380967602565625016981
48208341878316384911559022561000365235137034387446184837
87372381982248498634650331594100549747005931383392264972
49461751545728366702369745461014655997933798537483143786
841806593422227898388722980000748404719

Unfortunately, most SQL databases cannot handle such large numbers without any additional libraries, except for the awesome PostgreSQL, whose decimal / numeric types can handle up to 131072 digits before the decimal point and up to 16383 digits after the decimal point.

Yet again, unfortunately, even PostgreSQL by default can’t handle such precisions / scales, so we’re using a trick to expand the precision beyond what’s available by default.

Check it out.

Comments closed