Thread: Why do these things fail sometimes? Annoying program!

Hiya, I have been working on a program that looks for 4 in a line in a 2D array. I have made several methods such as

 if(token(i,j) == token(i+1,j) {
        if(token(i+1,j) == token(i+2,j) {
                  Counter++;
}
}

These methods work fairly well sometimes and completely fail at others. I get all excited that my program works, and the next minute, using the same pattern, it doesnt! It also sees things that are not there.

It this a common problem in java for these methods to not always check very well. Even my Winner method sometimes fails even though if I re-do the pattern it works. Also I have had to keep several backups as slight changes to it when working make it return very strange things!

Why do my methods fail sometimes and not others? Is it my code, or some sort of slow java related problem?? I seem to get it working just by looking at it sometimes.

Where token is just return array[col][row];

Sorry it was an example and not typed well. It returns an int

public int token(int col, int row) {
return array[col][row] }

simply

if (array[i][j] == array[i+1][j]) {
if (array[i+1][j] == array[i+2][j]) {
 Counter += 3;
}
}
 
if (array[i][j] == array[i][j+1]) {
if (array[i][j+1] == array[i][j+2]) {
 Counter += 3;
}
}

etc.

And searches for different size lines of the same Number adding points accordingly.
Is there a better way?

Why do my methods fail sometimes and not others? Is it my code, or some sort of slow java related problem??

Java, or any other common programming language for that matter, would not be used worldwide in all sorts of distributed applications if it were unpredictable. Problems such as this are logic/algorithm related - in other words, its the programmers fault. It helps to think through the logic, draw out what happens, to help you debug. As is it is hard to see what's going on, so to help you break the problem down, try creating an SSCCE for both yourself and for us.