I'm a magician in addition to being a software developer. I used Clojure to help develop the algorithm behind a magic trick to create my own version of the trick. The original trick (not invented by me) is called "Stegosaurus" and marketed by Penguin Magic. I currently sell my enhancements made by my Clojure developments on The Game Crafter.
Private code for Scott Starkey's "Stegosaurus" project. See a demo of the original trick at https://www.penguinmagic.com/p/6252 The code is used for my Animal Themed deck at https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/stegosaurus-animal-themed-poker-size
The original algorithm of the magic trick is a binary code of letters. In the base effect, cards either have letters for the left side of the keyboard or the right side. The list of 32 5-letter words is numbered 0 to 31. The first letter position is worth 16 points, the second letter is worth 8 points, and so on, so that each word has a unique position in the list in binary numbers. So, the word TIGER is equal to 19, because it is T (16 points), I (does not score 8 points), G (does not score 4 points), E (scores 2 points), R (scores 1 point). The letters scoring their binary position are roughly the left side of the QWERTY keyboard. A word like ONION, all on the right side of the keyboard, scores a 0.
The score-word function accepts a word and an optional regex. (If no regex is supplied, it will use the default regex as in the
original effect.) It will provide the binary score of the word given.
The all-english-words-sorted function (no parameters) will show each of the scores for all 5-letter words in the dictionary.
Call like (all-english-words-sorted).
The def alpha-combo2 is what I used to pare the 2 million combinations of regexes down to 6 possibilities to fill every slot of my
animals.txt word list. Warning! This takes hours to realize the full lazy sequence on my old MacBook Pro. If I made this again,
I would probably lean on multi-threading to reduce the time. However, something like (first alfpha-combo2) is safe and much faster.
Once I determined the 6 usable regexes, I plugged them into a simple loop to give me the proper animal list to use. (See lines 179-190.)
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