[Boston.pm] Tech Meeting Followup

It's the late tech meeting followup!  We had 16 people at last week's tech
meeting.


Kenneth Graves walked us through his three versions of a Kokuro solver,
starting with a simple but inefficient brute force approach and ending with
one with optimizations and heuristics to make it nice and speedy.  We also
learned that the Perl6-ish Moose.pm, while making it much more convenient
to write object code, adds a significant amount of overhead to each method
call, which is prohibitive for a non-interactive script like Kenneth's that
does a huge number of method calls.


Continuing the theme, Bill Ricker then showed us his script for solving
doublets, aka word ladders.  We talked about the benefits and drawbacks of
a depth-first search versus a breadth-first search, and also why some Unix
dictionaries contain lots of questionable words.


Our next meeting will be on Tuesday, November 14.  Let me know if you'd
like to give a presentation!

Ronald