On Aug 26, 3:02 am, Dave Angel <da...@ieee.org> wrote: > Stephen Fairchild wrote: > > Philip Semanchuk wrote: > > >> On Aug 25, 2009, at 6:14 PM, Gleb Belov wrote: > > >>> Hello! I'm working on an exercise wherein I have to write a Guess The > >>> Number game, but it's the computer who's guessing MY number. I can get > >>> it to work, but there's one obvious problem: the computer generates > >>> random numbers until one of them corresponds to my number, but it will > >>> often generate one number (eg. 4) numerous times, meaning it doesn't > >>> know that this number is invalid. What I mean is, it will sometimes > >>> use 37 tries to guess a number out of 1 - 9, which makes no sense, > >>> since it should only take 9 tries, at most. I was trying to find a way > >>> to make a dynamic list of all the numbers the computer generates in > >>> the loop and then make it re-generate the number if the previous > >>> number is present in the list, so it doesn't keep on generating 4 (as > >>> an example). I don't know if that makes sense... Basically, we humans > >>> know that once something is incorrect, there's no point in trying to > >>> use it as the answer next time, because we already know it's > >>> incorrect. How do I go about coding this in Python? I'm still quite > >>> new to the language so any help will be appreciated... > > >> One cheap way to do it (not necessarily efficient) is to make a list > >> of your possible guesses (e.g. range(1,10)), use random.shuffle() to > >> put them in random order and then run through the guesses one at a time. > > > import random > > import time > > > l = range(1, 10) > > > while l: > > print l.pop(random.randint(0, len(l) - 1)) > > time.sleep(2) > > While both of these will work well, I'd point out that a direct > translation of your question is to use a set. Define an empty set, and > each time you try a number unsuccessfully, add it to the set. Then just use > while x in myset: > x = newguess() > > to find the next guess. This approach isn't as efficient, but it's a > useful paradigm to understand. > > A separate question is whether the human is supposed to tell the > computer whether the guess is high or low. If so, you can eliminate > many numbers on each guess. For example, suppose the solution is 8. A > guess of 5 would say "too low." Then you'd cross off now only 5 but 1-4 > as well. > > With this change the best solution changes from a random shuffle to a > binary search. > > DaveA
That's a good point if you can define whether the computer has guessed too low/high, then you could use the previous guess to set a bounds and rescale the next random guess. min + (random_number * max) although I think random.randomint does this for you! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
