Ordering Board Game Geek GeekLists by Rank

2021-06-28

A quick script.

I play a lot of board games. With the whole COVID-19 mess, I’ve been playing a lot on Board Game Arena, which is a wonderful site. But one thing that’s a bit lacking is having ratings / metadata about games to great games I’ve just not heard about before. Where can you get lots of that data? Board Game Geek!

The problem though, is merging the two. So, how do we do it? Well, this time around, I’m going to start with this GeekList that someone else maintains of BGA games on BGG. Which has the games, but no ranks. And apparently there are no ways to rank those by BGG (for some reason). But that’s easy when you know a bit of scripting!

A Generic Brute Force Backtracking Solver

2021-06-25

One of the projects I’ve had vaguely in the back of my head is a sort of generic puzzle solver. I really love puzzles, but of the pencil and paper and video game varieties. So I think it would be awesome to write out a definition of a puzzle (say how to play Sudoku), give it input, and have it give me an answer back.

Well, I finally got around to trying it!

Categorizing r/Fantasy Book Bingo Books

2021-06-24

I’ve been working through the r/Fantasy 2021 Book Bingo this year:

2021 Book Bingo

(Hard Mode)

5 SFF Short Stories (Hard: An entire anthology or collection)

(Hard Mode)

Set in Asia (Hard: by an Asian author)

(Hard Mode)

r/Fantasy A to Z Genre Guide (Hard: by a BIPOC author)

(Hard Mode)

Found Family (Hard: featuring an LGBTQ+ character)

(Hard Mode)

First person POV (Hard: Multiple)

~~r/Fantasy Book Club (Hard: with participation)~~

Replaced with: Sequel: Not the First Book in the Series (2017)

(Hard Mode)

New to you author (Hard: haven’t heard much about)

(Hard Mode)

Gothic Fantasy (Hard: not in the Book Riot article)

Transmetropolitan, Vol. 1: Back on the Street

(Hard Mode)

Backlist book (Hard: published before 2000)

(Hard Mode)

Revenge-seeking character (Hard: revenge as the major book plot)

(Hard Mode)

Mystery plot (Hard: not primary world urban fantasy)

(Hard Mode)

Comfort read (Hard: that isn’t a reread)

(Hard Mode)

Debut novel (Hard: published in 2021)

(Hard Mode)

Cat squasher (500+ pages; Hard: 800+ pages)

(Hard Mode)

SFF-related nonfiction (Hard: published in the last 5 years)

(Hard Mode)

Latinx or Latin American author (Hard: with fewer than 1000 Goodreads ratings)

(Hard Mode)

Self published (Hard: with fewer than 50 Goodreads ratings)

(Hard Mode)

Forest setting (Hard: for the entire book)

(Hard Mode)

Genre mashup (Hard: of three or more genres)

(Hard Mode)

Has chapter titles of more than one word (Hard: for every chapter)

(Hard Mode)

___ of ___ (Hard: and ___)

(Hard Mode)

First contact (Hard: that doesn’t lead to war)

Trans or Nonbinary (Hard: protagonist)

(Hard Mode)

Debut author (Hard: with an AMA)

(Hard Mode)

Witches (Hard: as the main protagonist)

Partitioning a Linked List

2021-04-20

One more fairly standard tech interview problem (for better or for worse, you’re likely to see one of these if you go for a programming job):

Given a linked list and an element x. Partition the list so that all elements less than x are before elements greater than or equal to x, but do not otherwise change the order of the elements.

Dynamic Programming over a Matrix

2021-04-13

Another LeetCode problem. Given an MxN matrix of numbers, find the longest path of strictly increasing numbers. So for example in this matrix: 994 668 211 You can start with the 1 in the bottom center, go left to the two, then up to the 6, and 9. That’s the longest path, so return a 4. In this 3x3 case, it’s really easy to just brute force. Calculate all possible paths.

Phone Words--In English!

2021-04-09

Okay, let’s take this one step further. Rather than generating just phone words, let’s actually generate phone words. Someone has provided a list of words in English as a package, so we’ll add a filter to add that to our comprehension: from english_words import english_words_set def letterCombinations(self, digits: str) -> List[str]: if not digits: return [] letters = { '1': '', '2': 'abc', '3': 'def', '4': 'ghi', '5': 'jkl', '6': 'mno', '7': 'pqrs', '8': 'tuv', '9': 'wxyz', '0': ' ', } return [ word for product in itertools.

Phone Words

2021-04-06

Working through a few problems on LeetCode. I haven’t quite decided what I think of the site, but it’s a fun way to play with simple algorithms. Figured I might as well write up any I find interesting.

First interesting problem:

Given a standard lettered keypad, generate all words from a given phone number.