Alright, Skeeve, that's exactly the way I was headed, but it doesn't take me very long before I'm confounded by it. I find myself always wanting to revert to indices and crush it with brute force exhaustion like a numerical integration in fortran. I rarely find myself disappointed when I trust perl syntax.

Am I correct to think that the keys do not have to be unique? In my mind, the keys would represent the number of times a person has won. Stan won twice and dan won once. How do I marry @frequency to @correct in the script below?

$ perl tim1.pl
fan dango
4
4
2 1
$ cat tim1.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use 5.10.0;
use Crypt::Random qw( makerandom );

# initialize pseudorandoms
my $r = makerandom( Size => 512, Strength => 1 );
# print "$r\n";
srand($r);

#populate lists
my @winners = qw/stan dan/;
my @winner_copy = @winners;
my @correct = qw/stan dan fan dango/;
my @correct_copy = @correct;

#populate hash
my %correct;
@correct{@correct} = ();
delete @correct{@winners};
print join( ' ', keys %correct ), "\n";

my $count = scalar(@correct);
print "$count\n";
my @new_list = @correct;
$count = scalar(@new_list);
print "$count\n";

# if ( scalar(@correct) eq 0 )
my @frequency = (2, 1);
# --@frequency;  that didn't work
print "@frequency", "\n";
# decrement frequency
# does anyone with a key value of zero have a correct response yet?
# if yes, you have a winner; if not then test whether there was a corr
+ect response among those with positive keys.
# if no one correct among them, then there was no correct response, be
+cause that partitions the sets.
$
[download]

I tried to map out in pseudoscript what I'm doing here. Obviously, I don't have the parts to make a control that works yet, but the contest just started today, so I don't have to have winner until after the time window closes.

Why does the hash have 4 nodes after 2 have been deleted?

How do I decrement the keys of a hash?