Corner of Seven

I received a phone call from my Mom earlier this week, posing what would seem to be a simple question: “Could you help come up with something to manage the pinewood derby at the beginning of March?”

Little did I know that it was going to become a rather taxing endeavor.

The first step has been figuring out the best way to generate heats.  Given m entrants and n lanes, there must be m/n, rounded up, ‘heats’ in order to make sure everyone has raced the same number of times.  Some of these heats would be less than the number of lanes, but should be set up to be not only most fair to racers, but keep the scoring as even as possible.

I started out to see if, given m entrants and n lanes, if it was possible to have a true round-robin tournament; that is, make every racer have a race against every other entrant, and have each racer have the same number of races.  That would make the calculations for the winner the simplest.  Unfortunately, while easy on paper, it becomes impractical in real life.

For example, say we had 8 racers on 4 lanes.  In order to achieve a true round-robin state, we need to have ₈C₄ races, or 70 heats, in order to satisfy the above conditions.  Now, in practicality, do you think it’s possible to have 8 elementary school students sit patiently enough through seventy races?  I didn’t think so either.

My current goal is to make a heat generator out of some form of predictive system.  Using a map of entrants to see how many times one has competed against another, the generator picks the least raced candidates, in order to keep fairness at a maximum.  There are some other things to take into account for the day, like damage, re-races, and run-offs for ties, but those become part of the operation logic.  The true core of this is creating the heats for each level, and keep track of the points received for those races.

Found on http://www.makinggoodsoftware.com/

After reading this post on LifeHacker, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I should start doing something like this.  I mean, it works for Jerry Seinfeld, it can’t be all that bad.

Basically, as described on the link above, the idea is that you keep a daily calendar of all the specific goals you want to accomplish.  Every time you do something related to a goal,  mark off the day on the calendar.  Once you have a few days consecutively, that is a chain.  The object of this motivational strategy: Don’t Break the Chain. Seems like a simple enough thing.

In the spirit of bringing in new ideas in order to make things work, I’m going to use a modified schedule, but the chain still takes effect.  Different days for me will be devoted to different goals/tasks.  Mondays and Thursdays I tackle some Ruby code, so I can stay fresh and learn about some of the newer developments that I’ve missed, having been out of the Ruby loop for a while.  Tuesdays and Saturdays are devoted to Corner of Seven.  That’s right, you might actually see more blog posts. In addition, I’m looking at building new and experimental pieces onto the domain, including rails and Java webapps, and playing around with php and python, so I can apply these to the blog, and keep the site as a form of digital portfolio.  All of my things will be up here, so it makes it more centralized.

Motorola Droid

Finally, the big hurdle in my calendar, and what is to be the biggest chain – Android.  I’ve been looking at the mobile phone operating system for a while now, but haven’t had the drive to fully enter in and create things for it.  That is, until I saw (and afterwards, held) one of these.So, starting today, once a day I will try to do something new in terms of Android development, in an effort to increase my skill and knowledge in the mobile OS.  Hopefully we’ll get to see some neat little apps come out of this “Don’t break the chain” mentality.  Hope you’re along for the ride – I guess we’ll see come every Tuesday and Sunday.

Cheers for now.