Selecting a random question from a pool of questions until all questions are selected.

Hello. I am trying to create a random question generator for a project of mine but I do not know how to program matlab to pull out a question from a pool of questions. I was thinking that one would give values to each question and then have matlab randomly select a value that matches one of the questions but the only thing I know to do is to make matlab randomly output a number. Is there a way to make matlab output a random variable? Thank you!!!!!

[Guillaume]

Is there a way to make matlab output a random variable?

Hopefully, each of your question is not held in its own variable. They are all in a cell array or similar container. In which case, it's a simple matter of using randperm as per James' answer and indexing the cell array.

Answer 1

[James Tursa]

If you have n questions, then

q = randperm(n);

Gives you a random ordering of the numbers 1 through n. You can use that to cycle through the questions randomly and hit every question without repeats.

[Lovablepanda609]

Thank you. Is there a way to set values to my questions so that matlab pulls those questions out?

[James Tursa]

I would follow Guillaume's advice to use a cell array of strings.

[Guillaume]

So you would have:

questions = {'What is your name'
             'What is your quest'
             'What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow'}
qorder = randperm(numel(questions));
qreordered = questions(qorder)

You could even store the answers together with your questions in the same cell array

QandA = {'What is your name', 'Arthur, King of the Britons';
         'What is your quest', 'To seek the Holy Grail'; 
         'What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow', 'African or European?'}
qorder = randperm(numel(questions));
QandAreordered = QandA(qorder, :)
for qidx = 1:size(QandAreordered, 1)
   answer = input(QandAreordered{qidx, 1}, 's');
   if strcmp([answer ' '], QandAreordered{qidx, 2})
      fprintf('Correct\n');
   else
      fprintf('You''re thrown off the bridge\n');
   end
end

[James Tursa]

What do you mean ... an African Swallow or a European Swallow?

[Laiza Perez]

I know the questions are randomly selected but how do you get the answers to also reorder to match the questions that are reordered?