Question

I need to create a heads or tails project where the computer will guess randomly up to 5 times, but on the sixth time it will look into the playersGuessHistory variable setup as a string to see if it can find a match for a pattern of 4 entires. If there is a pattern found the computer will guess the next character after the pattern.

For example, given the sequence HHTTH the pattern is HHTT so the computer would guess H for the sixth turn. My only problem is that I’m having difficulty setting up the project so that it will look through the playersguesshistory and find the patterns and guess the next character in the history. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

This is a little snippet based on what I understand of your requirement. The below method will return a string of guesses of ‘H’ heads or ‘T’ tails. The first 5 guesses are random, and then if any sequence of 4 guesses is HHTT the final guess will be ‘H’.

     static string HeadsOrTails()
    {
        string guessHistory = String.Empty;
        // Guess heads or tails 5 times
        Random random = new Random();
        for (int currentGuess = 0; currentGuess < 5; currentGuess++)
        {
            if (random.Next(2) == 0)
                guessHistory += 'H';
            else
                guessHistory += 'T';
        }
        // Analyse pattern of guesses
        if (guessHistory.Substring(0, 4) == "HHTT" || guessHistory.Substring(1, 4) == "HHTT")
        {
            // If guess history contains HHTT then make the 6th guess = H
            guessHistory += 'H';
        }

        return guessHistory;
    }

This is a very simple implementation and will only work for 5 random initial guesses, but it should be quite easy to enhance as needed.