Question

We need to make some small program for school that rolls 5 dices and see if you get a three of a kind with it, if so, increase points etc.

The problem isnt to reading out the dice, I have the knowledge to get it done, but I want it to be a little efficient, not a ugly piece of code that takes up half a page. I have found ways to filter out the the duplicates in an array, but not the other way around. It rolls with 5 dices, so its an array with 5 numbers, is there like a built in function or a nice, efficient way of returning the number that has been rolled three times or return null if none of the number are rolled three times?

Hope anyone can push me in the right direction. 🙂

Answer 1

One approach is to store a 6-element array containing the count of how many dice have that face. Loop through the 5 dice and increment the appropriate face’s total count.

var rolls = new List<Roll>();
// run as many rolls as you want. e.g.:
rolls.Add(new Roll(5));
var threeOfAKindRolls = rolls.Where(r => r.HasThreeOfAKind());

public class Roll
{
     public Roll( int diceCount )
     {
          // Do your random generation here for the number of dice

         DiceResults = new int[0]; // your results.
         ResultCounts = new int[6]; // assuming 6 sided die

         foreach (var diceResult in DiceResults)
         {
             ResultCounts[diceResult]++;
         }
     }

     public int[] DiceResults { get; private set; }

     public int[] ResultCounts { get; private set; }

     public bool HasThreeOfAKind()
     {
         return ResultCounts.Any(count => count >= 3);
     }
}

This code can be shortened somewhat if you don’t need the result counts to perform other tests on the results:

     public Roll( int diceCount )
     {
          // Do your random generation here for the number of dice
         DiceResults = new int[0]; // your results.
     }

     public bool HasThreeOfAKind()
     {
         ResultCounts = new int[6]; // assuming 6 sided die
         foreach (var diceResult in DiceResults)
         {
             // Increment and shortcut if the previous value was 2
             if( (ResultCounts[diceResult]++) == 2) return true;
         }
         return false;
     }