Thread: Permutation

Hello community,

I'm working on a project an am in need of a little help, so I hope I'll get some hints here.

This is about a game, but I thought it fits this category best. So I do a board game with cards (which is completed) and now the ai needs to become smart. All this is done, but where I'm having trouble is finding permutations of my cards. Here's what we've got:
- cards are numbered from 0 to 6, so I work with ints (or Strings, whatever is best)
- we are given 9 cards --> so there could be something like 111534123
- we want to pick 5 cards (their order is the important thing here)
- we want to try out all permutations an find the best (this is done)
- it should be as fast a possible (getting all 9-int-permutation is not fast because of the trying part)

What I have so far is a method that finds all permutations of 5 (or 9) given ints _without_ repeating identical numbers (e.g. 11354 only appears once, not twice).
So my idea was to pick 5 out of these 9 ints and then permutate them with my algorithm.

What I need help with is:
- How do I pick 5 of these 9 cards to then permutate them? Without repetition of course.
- Is my idea nonsense and there is a way to combine these two steps or am I thinking in the complete wrong direction?

Furthermore, there are combinations that are deadly and we do not want to permutate them. Say we have 12345, and the testing shows card 2 kills us, so we don't want to test 12435,... because they're all deadly. (This is not the main question, I don't think this can be done without code.)

So, I hope I made myself clear, I apologize if not, and hope someone can give me some kind of idea. A hint would be enough, pseudo if it makes it clearer.

Thanks a lot,
Nahara

I'm a bit confused as to the game I mean what constitutes a good hand? I mean you say 12345 is deadly would 23456 or 01234 be stronger and how strong would say 66666 or 00000 be?

I'm bamboozled I have to say. If the order of cards is the most important have you thought about ordering them? For a video poker game I wrote I decided to create a duplicate of the hand that was ordered by strength of the card so checking for pairs/straights etc so I would only need to step through the cards from left to right once.

However that was a 5 choose 5 situation not a 9 choose 5 but if it is mostly order I think this would be something to look at.

Problem solved, topic can be closed.

Solution was completely different to my first approach, but works perfectly.
I guess I didn't describe it right, but thanks for helping anyway. (: