Vulpez

Vulpez, (or Vulp), is a member of the Snakebot community and an avid counter. They first joined the Highly Trained Monkeys Discord server on November 15th, 2020. Vulp's first message in the server was in the counting channel. They have contributed several strats to the community, most notably the Pisces strat.

History
Vulpez joined the subreddit /r/counting in January 2017 and quickly came to enjoy the many sidethreads, including beenary. Perhaps most enjoyable was the sense of camaraderie brought in such a niche community on the internet. This would also be felt in other interesting online social experiments such as /r/place, and of course Twitter Plays Snake.

While looking for other counting communities on the internet, Vulpez joined the /r/counting Discord server. Zomg was also a member of this server, and on May 10th, 2020 he linked to a counting thread on Twitter started under a tweet by @cark_irl. Vulpez joined this counting thread on Twitter, and followed many of the fellow counters there. One of the counters there who had been active in the thread for the longest time was @qwertyuiopleowo, or Leowo. Leowo found out about Snakebot at some point in November and began retweeting some of the bot's tweets. Vulpez mostly ignored these retweets at first, seeing it as spam in their timeline. Eventually however, Vulp decided to check out the bot. They were surprised to find that the snake was not just being driven in random directions. In fact, the players of this game were building a community, and had developed various strategies for how to get the snake to the apple. It was this level of coordination that convinced Vulpez to finally join the Snakebot community.

The first Snakebot tweet that Vulpez paid any attention to was the death of Larry, Bitch's predecessor. Users intentionally rammed the snake into a corner, because PolyMars had promised to update the bot to add a 5% tie leniency after the then current snake's death. At the time, corner apples were essentially a death sentence, because it was near impossible to get a perfect tie of retweets and likes. Vulpez joined the Highly Trained Monkeys Discord server and began actively participating in the bot's votes during the reign of the snake named Bitch.

Pisces
During the early part of Bitch's life, players were traversing the board using a strat called Qross. This strat was very effective at navigating about the 6x6 game board, covering the maximum amount of tiles without using any ties. However, it was soon realized that the snake would soon run out of space. Qross only covered 28 out of the 6x6 board's 36 tiles. A strat would need to be developed in order to stretch out the snake's tail, preventing it from running into itself. On November 16th, 2020 Vulpez drew the first version of what would become Pisces in a phone image editing app, and proposed it to the #strats channel (now named #snake_strats). Osi was in chat at the time, and proposed the name Pisces due to its resemblance to the Zodiac symbol. This initial version was rotated sideways compared to the strat that was later popularized, and almost won the game on the 6x6 board size.