Every four years (give or take a pandemic postponement) debate breaks out about the best way to measure who did best at the olympics. I’m going to look at a couple here. Medals What’s a better measure of success? Gold medals? Total medals? If we look at medal totals, the top ten looks like this: Gold Silver Bronze Medal Totals United States 40 44 42 126 China 40 27 24 91 Great Britain 14 22 29 65 France 16 26 22 64 Australia 18 19 16 53 Japan 20 12 13 45 Italy 12 13 15 40 Netherlands 15 7 12 34 Germany 12 13 8 33 South Korea 13 9 10 32 Whereas if we focus on gold medals only1 a very slightly different picture emerges: Read more

I was messing around with a project recently, and I thought everything was going swimmingly. My unit tests were passing, the output to stdin looked like I’d expect. And then I made one small change, and instead of the binary number I was expecting, I saw: 1010101001001020 “Ones and zeroes everywhere. And I think I saw a two!”; “It was just a dream, Bender. There’s no such thing as a two. Read more

The problem Python has a Counter object – it’s found in the collections module – and I’ve become convinced that it’s… a bit weird? The basic idea is fine: it’s a dictionary but the keys are things you want to count, and the values are the amount of the thing you have counted. The neat thing is if you initialise a counter with an iterable like a string or a list, it’ll give you the counts for the number of times each element appears. Read more

I had this idea for a project I could do, but I thought “maybe I should do this other thing first to get to grips with the API”. I was doing something for that project, and got distracted doing a simpler project to learn about the technologies and tools involved. I got distracted from that project by some weird behaviour of a class in the python standard library (I’ll post about that later). Read more

In a previous post I said I would come back to explain a few somewhat opaque lines in my matrix-based solution to Advent of Code 2022, day 2. This is what I’m going to do here. There’s three smallish things I thought it was worth pointing out. None is going to surprise veteran python coders, but they might be of interest to some. Building matrices So the first line I want to look at is: Read more