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

by Hajime Isayama

Hard Mode ✓

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

by R.F. Kuang

Hard Mode ✓

Set in Asia (Hard: by an Asian author)

by Victor LaValle

Hard Mode ✓

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

by T.J. Klune

Hard Mode ✓

Found Family (Hard: featuring an LGBTQ+ character)

by Maggie Stiefvater

Hard Mode ✓

First person POV (Hard: Multiple)

by David Farland

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

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

by Mary Norton

Hard Mode ✓

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

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Hard Mode ✓

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

Transmetropolitan, Vol. 1: Back on the Street

by Warren Ellis

Hard Mode ✓

Backlist book (Hard: published before 2000)

by Mark Lawrence

Hard Mode ✓

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

by Mur Lafferty

Hard Mode ✓

Mystery plot (Hard: not primary world urban fantasy)

by Patricia Briggs

Hard Mode ✓

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

by Randall Cooper

Hard Mode ✓

Debut novel (Hard: published in 2021)

by Jamie Delano

Hard Mode ✓

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

by Philip Pullman

Hard Mode ✓

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

by Kaela Rivera

Hard Mode ✓

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

by R.S. Craig

Hard Mode ✓

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

by Jeff VanderMeer

Hard Mode ✓

Forest setting (Hard: for the entire book)

by Tamsyn Muir

Hard Mode ✓

Genre mashup (Hard: of three or more genres)

by Matt Haig

Hard Mode ✓

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

by Curtis Craddock

Hard Mode ✓

___ of ___ (Hard: and ___)

by Andy Weir

Hard Mode ✓

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

by Rebecca Roanhorse

Trans or Nonbinary (Hard: protagonist)

by Becky Chambers

Hard Mode ✓

Debut author (Hard: with an AMA)

by Libba Bray

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.