Some amateur software projects at mainly.me.uk

This is work in progress to learn a little about web page basics. So, here are some amateur software projects.

Countdown numbers game solver

As a Christmas break project in 1988 I decided to code a solver for the Channel 4 Countdown numbers game. At the time this was not common although now it is. There are many others out there today.

In 1988 it was coded in C for my home PC running IBM Xenix on an Intel 80286 at 12 MHz with 1 Mbyte of RAM. That processor, quite good for the time, presented the challenge to write efficient code to find a solution within the game’s allowed 30 seconds. It finally did find a solution, if one existed, within about 15 seconds. However, if there were no solutions it took about three minutes to verify this.

Now updated and running under Linux (Mint) on a 2010-vintage i3-540 CPU with 4 Gbyte of RAM, the code will find all solutions, eliminate those that are not distinct and present the distinct solutions in a human-friendly way within about 0.1 seconds. When there are no solutions, it now takes about 11 ms to verify this. That’s about 16,000 times faster, CPU processing power having doubled every 1.6 years.

A high-level notes page and the program: here.

Countdown letters game solver

There is a Countdown letters game solver too originating from August 1988. At that time the major issue was disk storage space and the pre-processing time for the list of 60,000 words to make it easy to search for solutions during the game.  Run-time to solve a problem was always quick but pre-processing took about 40 minutes then.  Today a list of 230,000 words can be pre-processed on a modern solid-state disk in about one second. That’s about 9,000 times faster, data processing power having doubled every 1.7 years.

Maybe some more on this later: link TBA.

A PiCorePlayer-based audio streaming server/player

I installed an audio streamer some time ago based on PiCorePlayer.  Mine is now installed on two Raspberry Pi computers as separate server and player having run a combined server and player on one for some time.  

My notes cover both options: here.

John A. Phillips
2022-04-12