Getting Boolean value from greater than, less than, and equal to without a bunch of if statements?

Question

I have two lists compared for a game to see if one is greater/less or if they are equal.

If I use <= or >= the boolean value will print a win/lose. But if they are equal, the value will still be either win/lose. Is there a way to print "tie" without a bunch of if statements?

What I have now is this:

totalA = [5, 5, 5]
totalB = [5, 5, 5]

grandtotal = sum(totalA) <= sum(totalB)
if grandtotal == True:
     print("Win")
else:
     print("Lose")

Answer 1

If you have three possible outcomes, that's not a boolean value, since a boolean value by definition only has two possibilities. Capturing three possibilities with booleans requires at least two booleans (eg "Win" if a < b else "Lose" if b < a else "Tie" ). But if you want to do it with no if statements at all, there's a way!

Create a mathematical comparison function that'll return a result from the set -1, 0, 1 based on which of the two numbers is bigger, and then map those results to the desired strings.

print({
   1: "Win",
   0: "Tie",
   -1: "Lose",
}[(sum(totalB) - sum(totalA)) // (abs(sum(totalB) - sum(totalA)) or 1)])

Putting it into a function (and adding a bit of int conversion to make it handle float inputs as well):

>>> def print_result(totalA, totalB):
...     delta = sum(totalB) - sum(totalA)
...     print({
...        1: "Win",
...        0: "Tie",
...        -1: "Lose",
...     }[int(delta // (abs(delta) or 1))])
...
>>> print_result([5, 5, 5], [5, 5, 5])
Tie
>>> print_result([1, 2, 3], [2, 3, 4])
Win
>>> print_result([3, 4, 5], [2, 3, 4])
Lose
>>> print_result([5, 5, 5], [5, 5, 5.0])
Tie
>>> print_result([5, 5.1, 5], [5, 5, 5.0])
Lose
>>> print_result([5, 5.1, 5], [5, 5.2, 5.0])
Win