I had a thought about figuring out poker hands on the subway this morning and I gave it a whirl. I'm happy with my solution, but I don't know how elegant it is, so I thought I would see if the monks want to give a crack at it.
Also, I thought it might be nice to substitute short for elegant and see how low it can be golfed.
Here is the problem definition:
Given a 5 element array of cards, each a string of the form 'RS', where 'R' is the rank (2..10,J,Q,K,A) and where 'S' is the suit ('H','D','S','C'), determine what is the best poker hand that can be made with them. It is not necessary to determine striations with in a hand type (i.e. straight is acceptable, rather than 10-high straight). An example hand would be ('2H','9C','8H','JD','9S')


I have attached a scaffolding for the problem (I left use strict and warnings off for the golfers). The scaffolding allows you to enter a hand on the command-line for easy testing: 

use strict;
use warnings;
use List::Util qw(shuffle min max);
use Data::Dumper;

my @cards;

foreach my $r (2..10,'J','Q','K','A') {
    foreach my $s (qw(H S D C)) {
    push @cards,"$r$s";
    }
}

my @deck = shuffle @cards;

my @hand = sort @deck[0..4];

@hand = @ARGV if @ARGV;

print join(", ",@hand) . ":  ";

# your solution here, put answer in $hand

# end

print $hand;

[download]


-pete
"Worry is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you anywhere."

In reply to Golf/Elegance: Poker Hands by dreadpiratepeter

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