It's a brillant solution.

this was my first answer but test fails, so did the test change? went back and tried this answer and it fails.

takes me 15 secs to undestand the real clever man lmao

Darn, I tried a similar solution with preg_replace(), but with var_export() instead of print_r() and it ouputted something like "no shortcuts allowed".
Didn't think to go further down that route.

I tried this with array_count_values($a) but it doesn't count float values! This is a very good workaround!

really cool!

nice and concise!

true, thx

This solution won't work for $b = [[0,0,0],[1,1,1],[2,2,0]]. It will return 0 which means that the game is draw.

Clean as f

Why is this solution considered as clever?
Imagine one of your given range is [1, 9999999999] it will create 9999999998 array elements