London Python Dojo: does it have a keyboard?

Those of you who don’t frequent the London Python Dojo wouldn’t appreciate the in-joke behind the laughter which greeted the selection of “20 Questions” as the challenge for last night’s Dojo. For months Nicholas Tollervey, the main Dojo organiser, has seeded the list of Dojo suggestions with the idea of implementing a simple expert system where the computer maintains a taxonomy of objects and tries to identify an object of your selection within 20 guesses by a process of elimination. It’s become a source of humour that Nicholas has to offer the same explanation every month and that the idea is never selected as the challenge du jour. Well last night it was.

And I admit that it was much more involved than I had thought it would be. I honestly thought we’d be done in 10 minutes and looking for ways to fancy up the interface or whatever. How wrong I was! The teams split between a tree-based structure with nodes holding questions & answers and yes/no pointers; and a matrix of questions which attempted to eliminate possible objects with each question. Getting the exact looping and yes/no pointing right is harder than you might expect, especially when you’re pressed for time and you have a team of five people to consider.

We were hosted, not for the first time, by Mind Candy (of Moshi Monsters fame) in their gorgeously child-friendly offices with Mind Candy local Al Broomhead as MC. And, as always, O’Reilly provided a book for the end-of-evening raffle. I’m consistently impressed by O’Reilly’s readiness to support us: I imagine it doesn’t cost them loads to give away a book a month, but they could so easily turn us down and they continue to provide, month after month.

There have been discussions, on-list and in private, about various aspects of the London Python Dojo and the organisers have various ideas in mind, but we’re not planning to do anything drastic to the current approach. (Although our setup means we can easily experiment with something if we want). Our main idea is to emphasise our status as a beginner-friendly forum where everyone can and should get a chance to code in Python even if they’re a newbie amongst experts. I’m glad to say that, in our team yesterday, everyone got a chance to code, however lightly.

Beforehand, @ntoll gave a talk about the upcoming PyConUK and particularly about the education track, encouraging people who know or are teachers and who know or are children to come along to these special aspects of the conference. I also gave a lightning talk about the socio-political challenges in Python core development — and about how people could and should contribute.

[The title of this post refers to a commonly-asked question shouted out from the audience as the various teams were demo-ing their approaches. Demonstrating necessarily involves going through as a series of “Is it …?” “What question could I ask…?” prompts and this one turned out to be a popular question, especially if the object in mind was a Robotic Catfish!]