Help with arrays

[Philip Semanchuk]

On Aug 25, 2009, at 6:14 PM, Gleb Belov wrote:

> Hello! I'm working on an exercise wherein I have to write a Guess The
> Number game, but it's the computer who's guessing MY number. I can get
> it to work, but there's one obvious problem: the computer generates
> random numbers until one of them corresponds to my number, but it will
> often generate one number (eg. 4) numerous times, meaning it doesn't
> know that this number is invalid. What I mean is, it will sometimes
> use 37 tries to guess a number out of 1 - 9, which makes no sense,
> since it should only take 9 tries, at most. I was trying to find a way
> to make a dynamic list of all the numbers the computer generates in
> the loop and then make it re-generate the number if the previous
> number is present in the list, so it doesn't keep on generating 4 (as
> an example). I don't know if that makes sense... Basically, we humans
> know that once something is incorrect, there's no point in trying to
> use it as the answer next time, because we already know it's
> incorrect. How do I go about coding this in Python? I'm still quite
> new to the language so any help will be appreciated...

One cheap way to do it (not necessarily efficient) is to make a list  
of your possible guesses (e.g. range(1,10)), use random.shuffle() to  
put them in random order and then run through the guesses one at a time.

HTH
Philip