Thanksgiving

Well thanksgiving came up quick.  I rented Fable III and have been playing it almost nonstop.  I  beat it yesterday.  It's a good game, but there seems to be something lacking in its writing.

I like the game mechanics.  The magic and weapon mechanics feel like an improvement on Fable 2, but everything you do in Fable 3 just seems to feel less important than it did in Fable 2.  I saw one review say it was good, but less magical, and I'm inclined to agree.

My family finally got me off the tv a couple of hours ago and I've been working on Project Euler in my extra time.  I'll post my solutions to problems 16, 20, and 48 later.

Coding Journey: Google AI

I've spent the past few days going over every bit of my code for the Google AI Challenge.  I've written and rewritten everything over and over and I finally have something that actually works.  If it weren't for output files, I couldn't have figured out any of my bot's errors.

Well, Thanksgiving's coming up and I'll be heading home on Friday after my calc test.  It's a sixteen hour drive home, but at least there's some good food at the end of it.

Good Times

I finally got Fable working and have wasted hours playing and modding it.  It was a strange kind of relief, doing nothing for so long.  Anyway, that and the fact that a Microsoft rep gave me a copy of Halo Reach in my comp sci class today makes for a satisfying twenty four hours.

Coding Journey: Euler Problem 22

Last night I decided that I wanted to install some of my old games on my computer.  I found out that I've lost the file I had saved containing all of the keys to my pc games (all legal games and keys, fyi).  So many keys lost!

I hate drm.  It makes games more trouble than they're worth.  It still angers me to no end that I can't play Half-Life or Portal without an internet connection.

Anyway.

I spent some time last night and this morning working on problem 22 of Project Euler.  It's in C++ because I figured the speed would be an advantage in processing everything.

It took me a while to figure out the answer, mostly because I was mistakenly using the ASCII values of each word in my calculations rather than alphabetic values (e.i. a = 1, b = 2, c = 3, ect).

Once I got it working, I went through and tried to comment most of it, but I have to say this whole program seems clunky to me.  It works, but I think I could've done a better job.  Anyway, here's my solution, for your coding pleasure.

College Days

I thought that in college I'd be going to parties, playing music, and hanging out with non-nerdy people.  Instead, I find myself helping my comp-sci friends with programming assignments and coding in my free time.  Don't get me wrong, I love the comp-sci people, but the de-nerdening I had expected for in college is not forthcoming.

I've spent the bulk of my last two days trying to learn Python.  I worked out this script to solve problem 21 of Project Euler.

#!\usr\local\bin\python

def sum(a):
        divTot = 0
        for k in range(1,a):
                if (a%k) == 0:
                        divTot += k
        return divTot

amicableNumbers = []
total = 0

for i in range(0, 10000):
        temp = sum(i)
        if temp < i:
                if (sum(temp) == i):
                        amicableNumbers.append(i)
                        amicableNumbers.append(temp)

for k in range(0,len(amicableNumbers)):
        total += amicableNumbers[k]

print total

  It takes a few seconds to work, but it does the trick.