Question

I’m making a card game and I need to previously create the cards and store them in a mysql table. I’m trying to figure out how to make a php script to create them.
Well, there are 6 categories of values that vary from 0 to 12 and every card has values for each category. The sum of the values of the categories in each card MUST be 36. So each card is something like this:

• 6 – 9 – 2 – 10 – 6 – 3

OR

• 0 – 12 – 0 – 12 – 0 – 12

OR EVEN

• 6 – 6 – 6 – 6 – 6 – 6

I think if I could randomly generate like 50 or 60 cards it wold be awesome.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

A really naive approach is:

/* return an array of 6 numbers between 0 and 12 that sum to 36 */
generate_card() {
    $numbers = array();
    for($i = 0; $i < 6; $i += 1) {
        $numbers[$i] = rand(0, 12);
    }
    if (array_sum($numbers) !== 36) {
        return generate_card(); // repeat until we find one that does sum to 36
    } else {
        return $numbers; // yay!
    }
}

I think this will perform well enough for a ‘simple card game’.