Box Relatives

alexboisvert.com

Thoughts about puzzles, math, coding, and miscellaneous

rss2 wordpress content slash wfw atom dc sy

Open the feed

https://alexboisvert.com/musings/feed/

Last post: Jan 16, 2018
Posts in 24 h · 7 days · 30 days: 0 · 0 · 0
Our last check: Answering
Served from: United States
Text score at discovery: 3,077
Format: rss2
Features in the feed: content, slash, wfw, atom, dc, sy
Community: wordpress

Posts

What our queue read from this feed. Open one to read it here, or go to the site that published it.

Solving Star Battle Puzzles
Jan 16, 2018 · original
UPDATE: There is now a JavaScript Star Battle Solver! It’ll solve fairly simply ones no problem. Don’t expect miracles on harder puzzles, though — more likely than not they will just crash your browser. This past weekend I “attended” my first MIT Mystery Hunt as part of Test Solution Please Ignore. I didn’t do much solving but what I did do was a lot of fun. Maybe I’ll attend in person next year; it’s always nice having an excuse to go to Boston. Anyway, one member of our team designed a pretty cool logo: It’s a “TSPI”-themed star battle puzzle! You solve it by placing one star in each row, column, and region. I thought it was pretty cool, but I’m better at coding than solving, so I thought I’d write a quickie program in Python to solve it (and others). Here it is: import numpy as np # pip install python-constraint from constraint import Problem class StarBattle: ''' A class for storing,
The new alexboisvert.com
Nov 17, 2016 · original
If you’re a regular visitor to this website, you probably noticed that the front page isn’t there anymore, having been replaced by this blog. Well, that’s because all the stuff that used to be there has been refactored in JavaScript and moved to Crossword Nexus . Here are the specific links: Algebraic Crosswords Puz To NYT Puz To PDF Roman Numeral Clues Clue Deduper CrossQuip Double Occupancy I think you’ll like the new versions better — they’re faster than the old code and nothing is ever uploaded to our servers. Enjoy and tell me what you think!
Introducing Crossword Dash
Sep 14, 2015 · original
Yesterday, at the September 2015 Southern California Puzzle Party, I introduced a game called Crossword Dash. It’s a bluffing game along the lines of Balderdash (TM), but instead of guessing the definition to a word, the players guess a clue corresponding to an entry from a terrible crossword. Aside from a few technical snafus, the game went well and it appeared people had a good time. If this sounds fun to you but you couldn’t be there yesterday, I have good news! You can play this game any time you like at http://www.crosswordnexus.com/dash . The game is completely free, and pre-loaded with 150+ pairs of terrible clues/answers. I don’t think people will get a lot of use out of it since it is a pretty niche game, but if you’re ever around like-minded crossword people (say, at a crossword tournament or puzzle hunt) it turns out to be a pretty fun party game. You just need one person to h
NPR Puzzle for 2015-05-17: Solving With Python
May 21, 2015 · original
Here’s this week’s NPR puzzle : Name a country with at least three consonants. These are the same consonants, in the same order, as in the name of a language spoken by millions of people worldwide. The country and the place where the language is principally spoken are in different parts of the globe. What country and what language are these? Let’s see what the NLTK can do for us here. As usual, the goal is to do this in pure Python, without any external help. Getting a list of countries is super easy: [python] from nltk.corpus import gazetteers countries = set([country for filename in (‘isocountries.txt’,’countries.txt’) for country in gazetteers.words(filename)]) [/python] Getting a list of languages? Well, let’s use Wordnet for that. First, let’s look at where the word “Swahili” falls in Wordnet by printing its hypernyms: [python] synsets = wn.synsets(‘swahili’) synset = synsets[0] whi
How to embed puzzles with the Nexus JPZ Solver
May 16, 2015 · original
So you’re aware that the Crossword Nexus JPZ Solver exists, and you know it can be embedded in websites. But how can you get it into yours? It’s a fairly easy process and I’ll walk you through it right now. Initial Setup First you’ll need to get the code from github onto your website somehow. If you have SSH access you can just do a git clone: go to your web root (usually ~/public_html) and enter the following command: git clone https://github.com/crosswordnexus/html5-crossword-solver.git html5-crossword-solver If you don’t, the easiest thing to do is to download the code and then unzip it in a new directory in your web root. I’m going to assume you unzipped it in ~/public_html/html5-crossword-solver. The advantage of the first method is that whenever there’s an update to the code, you can just do a git pull command, whereas the second requires you to download and unzip the code all over
HTML5 Solver Feedback
May 1, 2015 · original
At this point the HTML5 Crossword Solver is basically done, so I’m taking it out of its brief “beta” phase. There is now a recommended way to embed it in websites, like I’ve done above. And it will even automatically resize itself if you shrink your window — go ahead, try it out! Once again, I can’t thank Alex Shpak enough for coding all of this up. But Alex S. can only take me so far. Now I need your help. I would really, really appreciate it if you would take five minutes or so and solve a puzzle in the solver, either the embedded one above, or one of your own JPZs at the official site . Is there anything in the interface you can’t live without? A “check” feature and timer come to mind, but maybe there’s something else. Are there any keyboard shortcuts that are missing? Do all the keys behave like you’d expect them to? The hope is that this will be everyone’s go-to interface for JPZ so
Introducing the Crossword Nexus HTML5 Solver
Apr 18, 2015 · original
People seem to agree that JPZ files are the future of crossword solving. JPZs are extremely flexible, well-documented , and supported by the most popular crossword-making software. The problem thus far with JPZs has been solving them. XWord is great but only available for PCs. Crossword Solver is cross-platform, but many are somewhat less than enamored with its solving interface. Somehow, the state of online solvers is even worse. If you want to embed puzzles in your website, what can you do? You can get a java version and deal with all the overhead and security risks that come there. You can buy Crossword Compiler and they’ll give you a license to use their HTML5 solver, but its interface isn’t any better than Crossword Solver’s, and it can’t handle all of the JPZ features you might want . We decided to kill two birds with one stone. Introducing the Crossword Nexus Solver (currently in
Rot-13 Bookmarklet
Oct 21, 2014 · original
-1)character=coding.charAt(position+13);r+=character;}return%20r;}function%20getSelText(){var%20txt="";if(window.getSelection){txt=window.getSelection();}else%20if(document.getSelection){txt=document.getSelection();}else%20if(document.selection){txt=document.selection.createRange().text;}else%20return;return%20txt;}S=getSelText();function%20t(N){return%20N.nodeType==N.TEXT_NODE;}function%20r(N){if(t(N))N.data=rot13(N.data);}for(j=0;j Rot-13 Drag this link into the bookmark toolbar of Firefox or Chrome. When you highlight text in your browser and click the bookmarklet, it will automatically be encrypted (or decrypted) with Rot-13. Want to try it out? Highlight the following and click the bookmarklet. Url, pbatenghyngvbaf, vg ybbxf yvxr vg’f jbexvat! The code is based on the Rot-13 bookmarklet found here , with extra functionality for selecting more highlighted info from this StackOverflow
Puzzle Party Idea
Sep 15, 2014 · original
Here in the Los Angeles area, puzzle-minded people like myself gather every two months for what we like to call a “puzzle party.” Several regulars will bring puzzles or games and we’ll solve them as a group. In the most recent one I presented a pairs solving puzzle (but one that’s doable solo) — you can download the PDF by clicking here. Still, I got to thinking about what I might present for a future installment, and I came up with a game I’d like to call “Crosswordash.” I need some help perfecting the idea, though. If you’re interested in adding your thoughts, I’d love to hear them. Details after the jump … If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you may have read a tweet or two about a certain terrible crossword that for some reason is still popular among local crosswords. It is *so* bad that it inspired an idea for a new game. As you may have guessed from the name, “Crosswordash” is
NPR Puzzle for August 10, 2014: solving with Python!
Aug 14, 2014 · original
Here’s this past week’s NPR puzzle: Name a well-known movie of the past — two words, seven letters in total. These seven letters can be rearranged to spell the name of an animal plus the sound it makes. What animal is it? Brute-forcing this puzzle is easy but ineffective. We can get a list of movies from IMDB and see which of the seven-letter ones can anagram into two words. But you don’t want to do this, because it will force you to sift through a ton of results. Can we do better? (Yes, we can.) We don’t want to use *all* movies, and *all* words if we can avoid it. Can we get a list of “well-known” movies, animals, or animal sounds? The first is the easiest; instead of downloading the movies.list file from the IMDB link above, download the ratings.list file and only consider movies that have above a certain threshold of votes. I actually rated the movies on a scale of 1-100 using this m

Discovered by the rss-feed-index crawler, which checks each feed at most once a month.

Same record as JSON: https://api.agentalog.com/api/feeds/fd_alexboisvert_com_d38b417e32419a10. More from this site: alexboisvert.com in the Feeds tab.