Post: #1

Hey people, I am working on a Hold'em poker script for the community... but I am in need of some help in optimizing some functions that are frequently called. The first one I'd like you to look at for me is an easy one ;-)

This function compares two poker cards to each other... In Poker the highest card is an Ace, next highest is King, then Queen, Jack, Ten, then 9 down to 2. Take a look at the function below and see if you can optimize it further for me:

Note: In this system, poker cards are represented by two letter combinations, and the ranking order needs to be: "As", "Ah", "Ad", "Ac", "Ks", "Kh", "Kd", "Kc", "Qs", "Qh", "Qd", "Qc", "Js", "Jh", "Jd", "Jc", "Ts", "Th", "Td", "Tc", "9s", "9h", "9d", "9c", "8s", "8h", "8d", "8c", "7s", "7h", "7d", "7c", "6s", "6h", "6d", "6c", "5s", "5h", "5d", "5c", "4s", "4h", "4d", "4c", "3s", "3h", "3d", "3c", "2s", "2h", "2d", "2c"

Post: #2

Why don't use numbers for everything?
Let me analyze this:

You got 12 cards in every color. That gives you 12 ranks.
You got numbers from 2 to 9. So you don't have 2 digits.
You got A, K, Q, J as letters, but you can use them as numbers if you like (Spanish cards goes from 1 to 12).

So let's say you make a number using the Rank and Color of the card.
For the Ace of Spades you'll have 13-1 (Saying 13 is the highest rank and 1 is the color).
And for the 4 of Spades you'll have 4-1.

That gives you 131 against 41.
Now, that's fine if you have only ONE color, now you got 4 colors, so the result may change from 131 to 134.
I'll give you the solution: Card / 10. So, if the Card is 131 (Ace of Spades) against 134 (Ace of Hearts), you divide them by 10 and that should give you 13 against 13.
If you want to recover the color for the royal flush, you can use a strsub. This way you can analyze Pairs and Three of a Kind with no problem, same goes for Poker and Full.
The only "hard part" is the flush or royal flush, since Straigth is kinda easy (divide everything by 10 and it should give you a straigth). For the Royal you can save resources by only analyzing if you first have a Straigth. In the case of the Flush, you have to analyze if you have all different ranks in the hand.

After that you can create a defname or something like that to "rename" the cards numbers.
Did you get my idea?

Post: #3

I like that idea of having an array of card properties... Here is what I did instead:

---

I alluded to a more complicated optimization.... here is a card sorting function (a horrifying CompSci 201 bubble sort that leverages the previous f_poker_RankCards function)... It works but its not ideal. Can anyone make me a quicksort or merge-sort version while I carry on with other functions?


In order to make a new deck of cards (as a global LIST object containing an array of abbreviated Poker card names)... and then shuffle it... these functions will come in handy:


As always... please point out suggestions for optimization!

Post: #4

This function:


Sometimes produces an error:


Any suggestions for a proper fix?

Post: #5

Just a few questions, is LIST global or local? Does it get erased after the game is aquitted? If not, you should think of storing your LIST as a TAG on the game holder, have it stored like an array sorted by commas to retrieve and organize it all. I would suggest CTAG but it is online only, and sometimes players have connection issues.

You could probably sort your tags out (in a similar fashion) on the table masters/game hosts character as:

tag.poker.cardlist //cards to be played (all 52 shuffled at the beginning of the hand)
tag.poker.hand //current hand (to be organized as posted above)

The idea of LIST looks bulky to me, especially considering a gameserver can populate very high. With a couple tags, storing the info as an array, you can erase these after the game ends. Maybe it'll help, not sure.

Your code above looks optimized, loops are always a bit of a ram chug but it's the only way you can sort your hands, seeing that poker will have 5 cards to sort out between all players won't show much of a problem in my opinion... it looks alright.

An easy way to know how to sort your cards (by #), go to the store, pickup a fresh pack of cards for $1. Start counting them out, that'll give you a numbered list and an proper array to sort out

Post: #6

LIST is global like VAR, it is permanent (they are saved in spheredata.scp like VARs are.)

I originally implemented the entire thing in TAGs but it was a huge pain to manage mixed (string/numeric) values and the LIST functions manage all that automatically. Its also trivial to build multi-dimensional arrays using LIST and doing that in TAGs is nightmarish due to the parsing of the delimiter characters etc.

The problem with the code above is that sometimes the last comparison causes the FOR loop to reverse (it essentially becomes FOR x 1 0) and then CardA becomes invalid because its looking at LIST[-1] (which is invalid) or something like that.

This is line 121:

Post: #7

Right, I know what you mean now (considering how your script originally was). But after reading Shir's suggestion, sorting your cart types using numbers 1 - 52 that 'mess' of an array will be gone if you were to use TAGs, guaranteed. You can use a function to read your hand, shuffle the cards, let me think up a simple script quick:

---

So if you were to sort your card names by 1 - 52 in a defname, as an example you can retrieve the card name by number like
Cards are also sorted by suite, example Spades are more than Hearts are more than Clubs are more than Diamonds. So sorting it out in number you can simplify this by dividing your deck by 4 suites.

Post: #8

I added an extra IF (<LOCAL.LoopNumber>) to prevent it from doing anything when LoopNumber is zero... Hopefully that doesn't have a negative side effect.

Post: #9

This is me holding a flower...(see Venn diagram)

Wolfram Alpha

And this is me just showing my ass...

First Function of 2 Boolean Variables

And this is me just being a friend...

I've included some C for you!

Which includes the fast algorithm you're looking for in it -- Monte Carlo

133,784,560 combinations

Snippet here

[/code]

The Count of Monte Cristo

Post: #10

(09-16-2012 10:03 PM)infinitynotpi Wrote:  This is me holding a flower...(see Venn diagram)

Wolfram Alpha

And this is me just showing my ass...

First Function of 2 Boolean Variables

And this is me just being a friend...

I've included some C for you!

Which includes the fast algorithm you're looking for in it -- Monte Carlo

133,784,560 combinations

Snippet here

Code:

/*
* returns number of dead cards, -1 on error
*
* argc, argv are the standard arguments to main
* num_dead is a return value of the number of dead cards
* dead_cards is a return value of the dead cards
*/
static int
parse_args(int argc, char **argv, int *num_dead, CardMask *dead_cards) {
  int i, c, o, rc, len;

  if (num_dead == NULL) {
    return (-1);
  }

  if (dead_cards == NULL) {
    return (-1);
  }

  *num_dead = 0;
  CardMask_RESET(*dead_cards);

  /*
   * parse any options passed to us.
   * -d "c1 [...]" is dead cards
   */
  while((o = getopt(argc, argv, opts)) != -1) {
    switch(o) {
    case 'd':
      len = strlen(optarg);
      for(i = 0;i < len;) {
    rc = StdDeck_stringToCard(optarg+i, &c);
    if (rc) {
      StdDeck_CardMask_SET(*dead_cards, c);
      (*num_dead)++;
      i += 2;
    } else {
      i++;
    }
      }
      break;
    }
  }

  return (*num_dead);
}

[/code]

The Count of Monte Cristo

what good is C programming going to do with his Sphere .SCP?

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