Jeff Epler's blog

FTL (un)packer for Linux

Really? Twelve stuffs? Now I can beat the rebels.

Update: Added some notes about what is in the various files in data.dat

Recently I bought Faster Than Light (FTL), a game which runs on Linux (and also on Mac and Windows).

I noticed that there was a lot of stuff in two ".dat" files; the format of the ".dat" files turned out to be very simple, and so I wrote a packer and unpacker: ftlpack.py.

Domino Sweeper

(M)(L)

Oops, I died

Many years ago--the fact that the original announcement has a note that Python 1.5.2 is required should give you some idea--I wrote this minesweeper variant in which the board has a combination of square and domino-shaped cells. It also has a much more powerful middle-click than traditional minesweeper.

I've made sure it runs with modern python (it did without modification) and added a GPL notice. It's not the greatest game, and it's not without a few bugs, but it's still something to spend a few minutes playing.

Files currently attached to this page:

dominosweeper.py	14.1kB
sweeper-medium.png	236.9kB
sweeper-small.png	66.0kB
sweeper.png	6.5kB

Tyler Wong's Possibly Optimal Hangman Strategy

I always like it when a computer is able to establish an optimal strategy for a game; that forever frees human beings from spending their time playing it.

Toward that end, here's an effort from 2001: http://www.sharkfeeder.com/hangman/. I wonder if a modern computer runs much faster than the reported 15 hours on a P3/600 -- let's hope it does. Perhaps this can be used to push the search deeper than choosing one of the 4 most likely letters at each junction, though for each one-letter increase I imagine there's a pretty steep runtime increase.