"An étude (a French word meaning study) is an instrumental musical composition, usually short, of considerable difficulty, and designed to provide practice material for perfecting a particular musical skill." — Wikipedia
This project contains pytudes—Python programs, usually short, for perfecting programming skills.
Some are in Jupyter (IPython) notebooks, some in .py files. You can view the files here on github, or click the NB link to view them on nbviewer (which sometimes works better). If you want to run the notebooks, not just view them, you can clone the project, or run all the notebooks online by clicking this button: 
| Programming Examples |
|---|
| Advent of Code 2018 NB, DN Puzzle site with a coding puzzle each day for Advent 2018 . |
| Advent of Code 2017 NB, DN Puzzle site with a coding puzzle each day for Advent 2017. |
| Advent of Code 2016 NB, DN Puzzle site with a coding puzzle each day for Advent 2016. |
| Project Euler Utilities NB, DN My utility functions for the Project Euler problems, including Primes and Factors. |
| Translating English Sentences into Propositional Logic Statements NB, DN Automatically converting informal English sentences into formal Propositional Logic. |
| Beal's Conjecture Revisited NB, DN A search for counterexamples to Beal's Conjecture |
| WWW: Who Will Win (NBA Title)? NB, DN Computing the probability of winning the NBA title, for my home town Warriors, or any other team. |
| Pickleball Tournament NB, DN Scheduling a doubles tournament fairly and efficiently. |
| Dice Baseball NB, DN Simulating baseball games. |
| Conway's Game of Life NB, DN The cellular automata zero-player game. |
| A Chaos Game with Triangles NB, DN A surprising appearance of the Sierpinski triangle in a random walk between vertexes. |
| Generating Mazes NB, DN Make a maze by generating a random tree superimposed on a grid. |
| Weighing Twelve Balls NB, DN A puzzle where you are given some billiard balls and a balance scale, and asked to find the one ball that is heavier or lighter, in a limited number of weighings. |
| Can't Stop NB, DN Optimal play in a dice board game. |
| Bike Speed Versus Grade NB, DN How fast can I bike as the route gets steeper? |
| Properly Ordered Card Hands NB, DN Can you get your hand of cards into a nice order with just one move? |
| Tracking Trump: Electoral Votes NB, DN How many electoral votes would Trump get if he wins the state where he has positive net approval? |
| Logic and Number Puzzles |
|---|
| When is Cheryl's Birthday? NB, DN Solving the "Cheryl's Birthday" logic puzzle. |
| When Cheryl Met Eve: A Birthday Story NB, DN Inventing new puzzles in the Style of Cheryl's Birthday. |
| Riddler Lottery NB, DN Can you find what lottery number tickets these five friends picked? |
| How Many Soldiers Do You Need to Beat the Night King? NB, DN Investigasting a battle between the army of the dead and the army of the living. |
| The Devil and the Coin Flip Game NB, DN How to beat the Devil at his own game. |
| The Puzzle of the Misanthropic Neighbors NB, DN How crowded will this neighborhood be, if nobody wants to live next door to anyone else? |
| Four 4s, Five 5s, and Countdown to 2016 NB, DN Solving the equation 10 _ 9 _ 8 _ 7 _ 6 _ 5 _ 4 _ 3 _ 2 _ 1 = 2016. From an Alex Bellos puzzle. |
| Sicherman Dice NB, DN Find a pair of dice that is like a regular pair of dice, only different. |
| Sol Golomb's Rectangle Puzzle NB, DN A Puzzle involving placing rectangles of different sizes inside a square. |
| Cryptarithmetic NB, DN Substitute digits for letters and make NUM + BER = PLAY. |
| The Riddler: Battle Royale NB, DN A puzzle involving allocating your troops and going up against an opponent. |
| Word Games |
|---|
| Spelling Bee NB, DN Find the highest-scoring board for the NY Times Spelling Bee puzzle. |
| Boggle / Inverse Boggle NB, DN Find all the words on a Boggle board; then find a board with a lot of words. |
| Portmantout Words NB, DN Find a long word that squishes together a bunch of words. |
| xkcd 1970: Name Dominoes NB, DN Lay out dominoes legally; the dominoes have people names, not numbers. |
| Ghost NB, DN The word game Ghost (add letters, try to avoid making a word). |
| World's Longest Palindrome NB, DN Searching for a long Panama-style palindrome, this time letter-by-letter. |
| Refactoring a Crossword Game Program NB, DN Refactoring the Scrabble / Word with Friends game from Udacity 212. |
| xkcd 1313: Regex Golf NB, DN Find the smallest regular expression; inspired by Randall Monroe. |
| xkcd 1313: Regex Golf (Part 2: Infinite Problems) NB, DN Regex Golf: better, faster, funner. With Stefan Pochmann. |
| Let's Code About Bike Locks NB, DN A tale of a bicycle combination lock that uses letters instead of digits. Inspired by Bike Snob NYC. |
| Gesture Typing NB, DN What word has the longest path on a gesture-typing smartphone keyboard? |
| How to Do Things with Words, or Statistical Natural Language Processing in Python NB, DN Spelling Correction, Secret Codes, Word Segmentation, and more: grab your bag of words. |
| Math Concepts |
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| A Concrete Introduction to Probability NB, DN Code and examples of the basic principles of Probability Theory. |
| Probability, Paradox, and the Reasonable Person Principle NB, DN Some classic paradoxes in Probability Theory, and how to think about disagreements. |
| Estimating Probabilities with Simulations NB, DN When the sample space is too complex, simulations can estimate probabilities. |
| Symbolic Algebra, Simplification, and Differentiation NB, DN A computer algebra system that manipulates expressions, including symbolic differentiation. |
| Economics Simulation NB, DN A simulation of a simple economic game. |
| How to Count Things NB, DN Combinatorial math: how to count how many things there are, when there are a lot of them. |
| Pairing Socks NB, DN What is the probability that you will be able to pair up socks as you randomly pull them out of the dryer? |
| Euler's Sum of Powers Conjecture NB, DN Solving a 200-year-old puzzle by finding integers that satisfy a5 + b5 + c5 + d5 = e5. |
| Computer Science Algorithms and Concepts |
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| BASIC Interpreter NB, DN How to write an interpreter for the BASIC programming language. |
| Bad Grade, Good Experience NB, DN As a student, did you ever get a bad grade on a programming assignment? (Snobol, Concordance) |
| The Convex Hull Problem NB, DN A classic Computer Science Algorithm. |
| The Traveling Salesperson Problem NB, DN Another of the classics. |
| File | Description | Documentation |
|---|---|---|
| SET.py | Analyze the card game SET. | SET.html |
| beal.py | Search for counterexamples to Beal's Conjecture | beal.html |
| docex.py | A framework for running unit tests, similar to doctest. |
|
| ibol.py | An Exercise in Species Barcoding | ibol.html |
| lettercount.py | Convert Google Ngram Counts to Letter Counts | mayzner.html |
| lis.py | Lisp Interpreter written in Python | lispy.html |
| lispy.py | Even Better Lisp Interpreter written in Python | lispy2.html |
| lispytest.py | Tests for Lisp Interpreters | |
| pal.py | Find long palindromes | palindrome.html |
| pal2.py | Find longer palindromes | palindrome.html |
| pal3.py | Find even longer palindromes | palindrome.html |
| py2html.py | Pretty-printer to format Python files as html | |
| spell.py | Spelling corrector | spell-correct.html |
| sudoku.py | Program to solve sudoku puzzles | sudoku.html |
| testaccum.py | Tests for my failed Python accumulation display proposal |
pyacc.html |
| yaptu.py | Yet Another Python Templating Utility |
I got the idea for the "etudes" part of the name from this 1978 book by Charles Wetherell that was very influential to me when I was first learning to program.
