Generating all 5 card poker hands

Your overall approach is sound. I’m pretty sure the problem lies with your make_canonical function. You can try printing out the hands with num_cards set to 3 or 4 and look for equivalencies that you’ve missed.

I found one, but there may be more:

# The inputs are equivalent and should return the same value
print make_canonical([8, 12 | 1]) # returns [8, 13]
print make_canonical([12, 8 | 1]) # returns [12, 9]

For reference, below is my solution (developed prior to looking at your solution). I used a depth-first search instead of a breadth-first search. Also, instead of writing a function to transform a hand to canonical form, I wrote a function to check if a hand is canonical. If it’s not canonical, I skip it. I defined rank = card % 13 and suit = card / 13. None of those differences are important.

import collections

def canonical(cards):
    """
    Rules for a canonical hand:
    1. The cards are in sorted order

    2. The i-th suit must have at least many cards as all later suits.  If a
       suit isn't present, it counts as having 0 cards.

    3. If two suits have the same number of cards, the ranks in the first suit
       must be lower or equal lexicographically (e.g., [1, 3] <= [2, 4]).

    4. Must be a valid hand (no duplicate cards)
    """

    if sorted(cards) != cards:
        return False
    by_suits = collections.defaultdict(list)
    for suit in range(0, 52, 13):
        by_suits[suit] = [card%13 for card in cards if suit <= card < suit+13]
        if len(set(by_suits[suit])) != len(by_suits[suit]):
            return False
    for suit in range(13, 52, 13):
        suit1 = by_suits[suit-13]
        suit2 = by_suits[suit]
        if not suit2: continue
        if len(suit1) < len(suit2):
            return False
        if len(suit1) == len(suit2) and suit1 > suit2:
            return False
    return True

def deal_cards(permutations, n, cards):
    if len(cards) == n:
        permutations.append(list(cards))
        return
    start = 0
    if cards:
        start = max(cards) + 1
    for card in range(start, 52):
        cards.append(card)
        if canonical(cards):
            deal_cards(permutations, n, cards)
        del cards[-1]

def generate_permutations(n):
    permutations = []
    deal_cards(permutations, n, [])
    return permutations

for cards in generate_permutations(5):
    print cards

It generates the correct number of permutations:

Cashew:~/$ python2.6 /tmp/cards.py | wc
134459