i hope you know that for this task, if you want it to be successfull, you need a really big database. it sounds very simple to this. it sounds like go through all possible permutations. before you start writing any code take a pencil and a big paper and do some maths. i sugesst you read and practise this for about a year about data structures, algorithms and graph theory (just for the begining). Then take a look on data mining and then incpect the era model so you can design a good database. Tic Tac Toe is a much easier problem and there are a lot of possible different games (9*8*7*6*5*4*3*2*1=362 880 i dont consider the rotations).
it's true that you learn best by solving a problem, but if stoped on basic on higjschool, then you will need a lot of time to solve this problem. If you remember basic than you should learn python according to basic's possibillities in maximum a month. depending on talent and spare time. i sugesst you take some a "a little bit" easier problem to learn python. For this speciffic problem it shold be good to learn on other games. I started about 7 years ago on tic tac toe and then with reversi. You are from USA? I come from a differtent continent so i don't know what you learn in schools. But if you didn't learn it, take a look on statistics. very usefull. you should at least know what specific terms mean althought python has them in the numpy module. don't be afraid of all that i said. keep learning and it will pay off. at the end when you crack the poker machine :-) that's the life of a geek. learn , learn, learn and one day comes the jackpot. -------------------------------------------------------------- and no, I am not a junkee, I'm addicted to Python -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list