Erik Max Francis wrote:
> flupke wrote:
>
<snip>
First of all, my apologies for the double posts. I can only see this
reply and can't see my original messages. I posted the message from home
and work and they didn't show up. We use the same isp at home and at
work so it's probably a problem on their end.
> It looks like you're not approaching this in a systematic manner.
> Algorithms for determining poker hands are already pretty well-known;
> there are several open source projects that do it efficiently which you
> could learn from.
Which projects are you talking about? I only found a library in c to
evaluat ranks but i didn't find the code to be very understandable.
> When you're evaluating poker hands, you're looking for three basic types
> of card groups: matches, straights, and flushes. The most efficient
> way to look for matches is with a histogram based on the card rank. Bin
> the cards up by rank, and then build a second "histogram" of the counts
> of those ranks indexing into a list of the ranks which had those cards
> (sorted by rank, so you can pull off the highest ones). Now determining
> all the rank-based hands is easy: quads have a hit with four matches, a
> boat has a hit with two three matches (there's no "two trips" so this is
> a boat at best) or both three and two matches, two pair has two hits
> with two matches, etc.
With histogram do you mean something like this:
Card hand: 2 clubs, 3 diamonds, 10 of diamonds, 4 of hearts, 3 of hearts
Histogram 1: list [2,3,4,10]
2 --------------------- 14
Histogram 2: list [1,2,1,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0]
or
list [1,2,1,1]
so index 0 is count of rank at index 0 of Histogram 1
index 1 is count of rank at index 1 of Histogram 1
> Searching for straights and flushes is much better done by masks.
> Arrange all the possible cards in a huge masks based on both cards and
> ranks (easy to do in Python with the long type) and then build up rank
> masks that build up all possible straight combinations (sorted by the
> highest rank so you can search them in order), and then build up card
> mask ranks for each suit. For straights, just iterate through the
> straight rank masks and see if you find one that's fully occupied; if
> you do, that's a straight. For flushes, just iterate through the card
> suit masks and see if you find one that has more five or more unique
> cards in it. You need to iterate through all four and find the one with
> the highest value (for games with lots of cards, you could have two
> flushes; you want to count the highest one). Finally, to look for
> straight flushes, first apply the suit masks and then turn it into ranks
> and apply the straight masks.
As for straights, if i understand correctly, you make all possible
straights of the cards in the hand and then see if one matches?
> Then will all this information you can easily arrange the code to select
> the best existing hand. Note that these all use well-established
> techniques and reveal nothing secret.
Well, it's all new to me :)
Regards,
Benedict
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