If you thought for a moment after reading the game description you might
have wondered how the computer was going to pick the number to be guessed.
The answer is that the computer needs some random or pseudorandom method for
choosing that number. I say pseudorandom because computers are not random
machines, they are deterministic machines so they can't generate something
truly random unless they get access to the output of some random physical
process. They can however generate numbers that seem unpredictable and so
appear random even though they are being generated programmatically. Python
makes this easy by providing a module we can import that hides the messy
details, e.g.
import random print random.randint(1,100)
The module is named random and one of its members is
randint which returns a random number in the specified range.
Exercise: Try entering the lines above into a program file and running it several times. Most times you will get new numbers. ('Most' because since it is random you may get the same number twice in a row, but since there are 100 possibilities that is unlikely.)
Exercise: Does randint generate numbers
between 1 and 100 or from 1 to 100
including 1 and 100? You can find out either by looking it
up, or by writing a very small program and watching its output.
Jargon: If the range includes the endpoints, e.g. 1 and 100 above, we say it is an inclusive range. If it doesn't, we say it is an exclusive range.