Brain Passion

[mattlistener]

I note well that most of my entries for the last two weeks have been about Jotto programming.

I'm realizing that I haven't felt since college such a combination of intellectual challenge and the passion to meet it. I'm finding it surprisingly rewarding to crack different parts of the project and then see the corresponding perl code fly off my fingers. It's serving as a reminder that I am Quite Bright, and that I haven't been using that faculty nearly as much as I would in my fullest and happiest life.

I'm going to see this through as far as the passion takes me, and then take a good look back at what I've learned as a result. Are there new ingredients I want to add to my calendar? Would I ultimately be happier spending the computing part of my work-week as a programmer rather than a sysadmin? Do I need to take a closer look at my passion for games and penchant for teaching them?

Update: I have completed a first draft of Evil Jotto. I haven't demonstrated yet that it outperforms the basic AI, but I did put in diagnostic code so I could see what it was doing once the wordlist got small enough, and it is indeed picking the most efficient guesses. Next steps will be to come up with an opening book of good starting words, and a less processor-intensive way of picking guess #2.

I'll post the answer to the anagram-frequency poll tomorrow. Anyone else want to guess first?

Comments

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Yay passion!

(I wrote a paragraph, then edited it down to that. :)