Question

i am trying to make a very simple game where i have 7 positions which are all hidden and within those there a 3 winning positions. I can pick randomly 3 times. I need to display whether the pick is a winning or not after every pick and store the result in a base.

Currently my thought where to generate an array of winning numbers on the first pick and then pick random number and check if it is in the winning array.

But i have a feeling that there is much more efficient way to do so.

Would appreciate if you would use PHP for coding examples, but pseudo code will do as-well.

EDIT
i am looking for the way to solve this without populating array with winning positions. maybe there is a way to do this with weights or probability percents.

Something like on first pick i have 3/7*100 percent chance to win. save result to base.
on second pick i have either 3/6*100 or 2/6*100 percent chance to win based weather i won in previous pick which i get from base.

Answer 1

Revised answer: this example does not require you to store the complete state of the game in a variable; instead, you just need to store the try count and won count:

$won = 0;
for($try = 0; $try < 3; $try++) {
    $slots = array_fill(0, 7 - $try, 0);  // blank slots
    $lucky = array_fill(0, 3 - $won, 1);  // lucky slots
    $pot = array_replace($slots, $lucky); // make some of the slots lucky
    $win = $pot[array_rand($pot)];        // randomly pick a slot
    $won += $win == 1;                    // update won count
    echo sprintf("Try %d: win=%d, total wins=%d\n", $try + 1, $win, $won);
}

Original answer:

$pot = array(               // pot is (an associative) array; 0 = blank, 1 = win
    "pos_1" => 0,
    "pos_2" => 0,
    "pos_3" => 0,
    "pos_4" => 0,
    "pos_5" => 0,
    "pos_6" => 0,
    "pos_7" => 0
);
$win = array_rand($pot, 3); // picks three indexes from the pot randomly
foreach($win as $w) {
    $pot[$w] = 1;           // set winning indicator
}
print_r($pot);

Output: array containing state of the pots.

Array
(
    [pos_1] => 0
    [pos_2] => 1
    [pos_3] => 0
    [pos_4] => 1
    [pos_5] => 1
    [pos_6] => 0
    [pos_7] => 0
)