While there is a logical basis to statistical analysis, successfully applying analytics to a scientific or business issue requires a great deal of creativity. You need to “limber up” your mind and cultivate the ability to see hidden meanings, the flip side, and “the dog that didn’t bark” – to quote Sherlock Holmes.
I’ve always been a fan of using Word Games and Puzzles to facilitate creative thinking. This blossomed into a full bore website last year. I did some “code doodling” last winter which turned into our hangman solver, word builder, boggle solver, and scrabble cheat. The story of the making of that site is told here.
My preferred game is Boggle – it improves your ability to see patterns and build iterations on a concept. Since there is a time component, Boggle games frequently are won by the player who can identify a relatively long root word and then capture as many iterations on that word as possible – using prefixes, suffixes, plurals, possessives, etc. to modify the initial word. This is wonderful preparation for SEO writing (eg… how many possible ways can we write “tank cleaning” on a page such that we don’t overload any two word combination and trigger a spam penalty).
Scrabble is also useful. First, you get a lot of practice “fitting” words into finite spaces – which can help you think about how to work around constraints. Second – unlike many other word games – you can “carry forward” letters between each round, encouraging you to think a move or two ahead. Should you play that four letter word or draw three tiles, hoping to extend it into a larger play?
Hangman is a simpler game – but writing a hanging with friends solver is actually great practice for some core software development skills. The dictionary search is basically just a pattern matching system. A simple hangman solver can be implemented as a Python script using regular expressions (for pattern matching) and basic file operations. This doesn’t scale very gracefully (eg. a web server) due to the volume of concurrent reads (we use a sophisticated algorithm that reduces disk reads and memory usage) but will teach you some useful things about Python.
And then we have the generics – which were technically just iterations on the other games that we developed. For example, we have a word jumble solver and word unscramble. Which are very similar to our word scramble solver which unscrambles words.
Another fun element of writing a hangman solver is designing a letter guess algorithm; hint: think about conditional probability. Implementing this is left as an exercise for the student, but you might want to read up about dictionaries and the itertools module…
Here are links to other game and puzzle resources:
Puzzle Master
Puzzle Master has a large and unique collection of brain teasers & puzzles for sale. In addition they also carry chess, mechanical banks, puzzle books, magic trick books, boomerangs, etc.
Passion for Puzzles
Passion for Puzzles is a fantastic site for all kinds of puzzles. You can find solutions for brain teasers. There is also a great section for online games and another section for daily online activities like crosswords, sudoku, word search etc.
Puzzle Express – Crosswords and more
curiouser.co.uk
– Home of the Paradoxical. Features a selection of paradoxical
puzzles, tricks, illusions, games, poems, quotations and more.
9 out of 10 respondents say curiouser.co.uk is the curiousest.
Gamepuzzles
– An absolutely massive collection of physical and online puzzles. A couple of word game puzzles you might want to check out: pingpong and alphabest. They’ve also created some really cool manipulative (physical) puzzles which are a work of art.
Crossdown
Ever want to make your own crossword puzzles? Crossdown is a piece of software which can help you do this! They also have software for creating acrostic puzzles and cryptograms. They have a tutorial about how to make your own crosswords by hand.