A Perplexed Python

[izmeina]

A certain Cyberian serpent has been gobbling up all my spare online time and more besides. Python is a hard task master and demands sacrificial offerings every week since early October. So I’m woefully behind in catching up with comments and gossip in general. Even the RasPutin vs The Mad Monk mixed martial arts championship has been sadly neglected. Some of the cartoonists have been having a wonderful time devoting their poisoned pens to portraying the assorted training regimes of the two combatants.




I must be going completely crazy. It’s simply not normal to be slaving over a keyboard at 6.30 in the morning in a desperate attempt to put some last minute touches on a very buggy game of Pong. I might manage to salvage 12 of the 19 possible points which is a bit of an improvement on the first version that would be struggling to score more than 6.
So it looks like I have well and truly hit the wall this week. Will keep plodding along anyway since this python is proud of her persistence. Here’s hoping the long hoped for light bulb moments are not too far away. November will be the true test of commitment since the annual ritual of novel writing is simply not negotiable.

It is simply not rational to expend such time and effort on a course that has very little use in real life. It could come in handy for two grand procrastination projects - a second attempt at Coursera’s cryptography classes and a rather long to do list at Project Euler. I guess they are the online equivalents of designing that deck of tarot cards, actually editing at least one of 5 nano novels and finishing sewing and stuffing Snowball the teddy bear.

And this week’s topic in the very interesting “Learning how to learn” course is all about procrastination and zombies. Perfect timing.

Comments

[izmeina]

Everyone keeps saying that when you click on a random card and know its index number then its value in the 'exposed' list changes. That might be the map but it's certainly not the territory. Well at least not in my case.

Did end up farting around a bit with it until the ridiculous hour of 2 in the morning with absolutely nothing to show for it

All the experiments resulted in either all the numbers showing or none at all. Nothing in between at all.
I spent lots of time concentrating on iteration and such and rather neglected the dark art of indices which turned out to be central to this whole drama.

Still quite stuck on the whole naming and calling of variables thing. I get the whole thing with the distinction between the contents/ values and the index/ position of a particular card but quite clueless about the subtle differences between the different calls.

Lots of folks were getting totally mixed up with the containers and their contents and there were a few good suggestions that future versions of the game should involve matching letters of the alphabet in order to keep the two concepts clearly separated.

So in the end none of the experiments made it into the very basic submitted version
http://www.codeskulptor.org/#user38_A9SsT65Pio_0.py

Some of the assorted experiments got left in this graveyard version with the strange green zombie lurking at the end of the line
http://www.codeskulptor.org/#user38_njmcLhcOLO_20.py

They are warning us already that Blackjack is the big bad project. I can just see an evil Izzie devouring cannibal python making an appearance in November's novel

[catness]

Bummer, I thought the explanation about indexes was adequate... Here's the corrected version with a lot of comments, I hope it's clear now? As the master of Maps vs Territory, you have to understand the difference between the indexes and contents very well ;)

http://www.codeskulptor.org/#user38_OiCqu46km465Xy6.py

(you still have to work on presentation, i.e. borders between cards, but it's a minor thing)

[izmeina]

Just peeked at your vastly improved version
Presently using rhe crappy tablet keyboard so no proper reply until some time later tomorrow
So far everything is explained in a manner that even newbies can understand. Maybe there is still hope for this frazzled zombie serpent ;)