News You Can Bruise for 2005 March 13

Permalink [Comments] (6) Sun Mar 13 2005 17:25:

Okay, that's enough of that. I took my cards to Moe's in Berkeley and found nine books from my wishlist (plus two not in the wishlist) without trying very hard. Then I went to B&N and spent accumulated gift cards on another five. The increasing fragmentation of my wish list is exposing problems in the Pocket Wisherman's automatic categorization, but if I fix them I'll just go off printing new copies of the cards and buying more dang books.

The new chapter I'm writing for the Python book is on network programming. I'm planning to write a tiny IRC-like chat room thing, and a multiplayer game of some sort, and maybe a file-sharing something to demonstrate peer-to-peer. Let me know if you have any ideas, especially for the game. I don't want to introduce a whole lot of irrelevant-to-the-chapter overhead just to get a cool demo application, but it'd be nice to have something besides the not-terribly-heart-pounding number-guessing game I'm currently planning.

Comments:

Posted by Brian Danger Hicks at Sun Mar 13 2005 21:34

This is getting far to efficient. If things keep going like this you won't have time to read them all. Of course, you'll also run out of money, so it'll all even out.

Posted by Zack at Mon Mar 14 2005 00:38

An IRC channel I hang out on has a Markov chain bot as a permanent resident. You can have conversations with it, like this:

Me: ,god never gives us more ice cream sandwhiches than we can eat. NEVER!Babble: we are small and she's taller than Dad.

The leading comma is to get its attention. It runs the Markov algorithm on a database containing everything anyone has ever said to it. This is a fun little toy, can be implemented in ~200 lines of code on top of a good IRC library (it would be a lot more if you had to do the protocol yourself), and allows you to demonstrate both network handling and simple databases.

Posted by caleb at Mon Mar 14 2005 12:11

You could write a game where two pirates/dinosaurs/whatever do battle, (all in text, I'm imagining, with a running commentary,) and the player(s) can place bets on the outcome.

Posted by Leonard at Mon Mar 14 2005 13:46

Hm, I like that idea. It reminds me of the Online Hedgehog Detector and Eliminator that I wrote for my BBS.

Posted by unclepedro at Mon Mar 14 2005 14:39

My 15-second idea is networked "Mines" game where you take turns clicking but you only get points for mines you have correctly flagged. If you blow up, you're stuck being an observer until there is only one player left(the mine you clicked is revealed but the game continues). You only get one click per turn, and the other players can see the same field, so if one player makes a mine obvious, the next observant player would flag that mine, rather than taking a chance. The trick would be in seeing the mines that the players before you missed.

That's probably too complicated for your example program, and I'm kind of disturbed that a networked "mines" game is what jumped to my mind... but anyway, there it is.

Posted by Factitious at Tue Mar 15 2005 14:42

Multiplayer Robot Finds Kitten, of course.

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