Question

I’m trying to make a simple solitaire in wich you get a random number of card heaps with a random number of cards in ex. heap1: 4 cards, heap2 5 cards and so on.
Lets say we have four heaps with values 4, 5, 7, 1.
Now what is done is that one card is removed from each heap to create a new one.
So the next step would look like this 4, 5, 7, 1 -> 3, 4, 6, 4.
The solitaire is finished when it reaches a stable number ex.
5, 3, 2 -> 4, 2, 1, 3 -> 3, 1, 2 ,4… now we will always get the same four values if the numbers are sorted.

How would this be done in the best way? I have some basic knowledge in programming but
nothing advanced.

So far i have tried this but it does not work out well, i don’t know how to make the loop
stop at a stable number.

while len(y) > 1:
    for i in range(len(y)):
        y[i] -= 1
    y = [x for x in y if x != 0]
    y.append(len(y))
    y.sort()
    print(y)

Answer 1

So the actual cards (colors, faces) do not matter at all since all you model is a number of heaps?

Use a list for the setup, integers to represent the heaps, and the random module to generate the initial configuration. Programming the game logic should be rather straight-forward.

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UPDATE

You’re code is a good start. To make things easier, consider breaking it up into separate functions. E.g.:

def next_configuration(y):
    """Take a configuration of heaps and remove one card from each
    heap to create a new heap.
    """
    new_y = [x - 1 for x in y if x > 1]
    new_y.append(len(y))
    new_y.sort(reverse=True)
    return new_y

Now you can test if the function does what it is supposed to do:

>>> next_configuration([5, 1, 3, 2])
[4, 4, 2, 1]

To play it to the end, generate the next configuration until the current configuration does not change any more:

config = generate_initial_configuration()
for i in range(max_rounds):
    new_config = next_configuration(config)
    if new_config == config:
        break
    config = new_config