Okay, so I wanted to mess around with Tarot cards, specifically figuring out combinations. I’ve been getting into Tarot readings lately, and the sheer number of card pairings got me thinking, “There’s gotta be a way to calculate this!” So I decided to build a little calculator for it.
First, I dusted off my super rusty coding skills. I mean really rusty. It’s been a while since I’ve done anything beyond, like, tweaking website themes. I figured Python would be the easiest way to go, since it’s pretty straightforward.
I started by reminding myself how to even do basic math in Python. You know, addition, subtraction – the easy stuff. Then I dug around online for some formulas for calculating combinations. I’m no math whiz, so this part took a bit of head-scratching.
I found this formula: n! / (r! (n-r)!), where ‘n’ is the total number of items (in this case, 78 Tarot cards), and ‘r’ is the number of items you’re choosing (like, 2 for a two-card combo). The exclamation point means “factorial,” which is just multiplying a number by all the numbers below it down to 1. (Like, 5! = 5 4 3 2 1).
Then I banged out some Python code. It wasn’t pretty, I’ll admit. Lots of Googling and trial-and-error. I kept messing up the factorial part, getting these crazy huge numbers that definitely weren’t right.
def factorial(num):
if num == 0:
return 1
else:
return num factorial(num-1)
def calculate_combinations(n, r):
return factorial(n) // (factorial(r) factorial(n-r))
#for tarot 78 cards
total_cards = 78
print(calculate_combinations(total_cards,2))
#3003
After some fiddling, I finally got it working! I made a simple function to calculate the factorial, and another one to handle the combinations formula.
I plugged in the numbers: 78 for ‘n’ (total cards) and 2 for ‘r’ (two-card spread). And boom! The calculator spit out the answer: 3003. That’s how many possible two-card combinations there are in a standard Tarot deck.
It’s not the fanciest thing in the world, but it works! And it was a fun little project to get my coding brain back in gear. Next, I might try to make it a bit more user-friendly, maybe even add a little interface. But for now, I’m pretty happy with my basic Tarot combo calculator.
