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<p><font face="serif">I am starting to get questions about how to
build the hands classifications for sorting. In other words,
how do you decide if something is a straight, a full-house, etc.
Don't make this more difficult than it has to be. For
example, one person wanted to assign a unique number for each
possible hand combination and use a lookup table for deciding
the winning order. That sounds like a nice computer science
approach -- until you consider that you would have to process
and store 311,875,200 different hands.</font></p>
<p><font face="serif">If you need some inspiration on how to break
down the hands, take a look at
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Poker_hand_analyser">https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Poker_hand_analyser</a>. Be warned,
some of these are VERY convoluted and I didn't use any of them
(my methods allow for a lot more code re-use) but they could get
you going if you are having "code writers block". <br>
</font></p>
<p><font face="serif">My biggest piece of advice is to think about
patterns. Each of the poker hands has to observe certain
patters (especially when the cards in the hand are sorted) -- so
use that to your advantage. <br>
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<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
<b><i>Andrew J. Pounds, Ph.D.</i></b><br>
<i>Professor of Chemistry and Computer Science</i><br>
<i>Director of the Computational Science Program</i><br>
<i>Mercer University, Macon, GA 31207 (478) 301-5627</i></div>
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