[Tutor] Chutes & Ladders

[Keith Winston]

On Sun, Dec 22, 2013 at 3:04 PM, <tutor-request at python.org> wrote:

>
> games = [p1.gameset(gamecount) for _ in range(multicount)]


So Peter gave me a list of suggesttions, all of which I've incorporated and
gotten running, and it's been instructive.

But in my haste I included the line above, cut & pasted from his
suggestion, without understanding what the underscore is doing in there. I
think I understand that at the prompt of the interpreter the underscore
returns the last value returned... but I can't really figure out what it's
doing here.

Also: this statement worked fine:

for tmulti in games:
    print("{moves:9.2f} {chutes:12.2f} {ladders:13.2f}".format(
            moves=mean(tgset[1] for tgset in tmulti),
            chutes=mean(tgset[2] for tgset in tmulti),
            ladders=mean(tgset[3] for tgset in tmulti)
            ))

Which is sort of awesome to me, but in my efforts to riff on it I've been
stumped: if I want to further process the arrays/lists my list
comprehensions are generating, I sort of can't, since they're gone: that
is, if I wanted to use the entire len(tmulti) of them to determine grand
total averages and variances, I can't. And if my array is large, I woudn't
want to iterate over it over and over to do each of these steps, I think.
Anyway, I'm just goofing on all this, for the learning value, but I'll
appreciate any thoughts. Thanks.

I'm also trying to speed up the program at this point: the way I've set it
up now it builds a list of lists (of lists) of all the stats of all the
games of all the gamesets of all the multisets. I've visually  streamlined
it some, without any effect on performance I can detect. Would using
arrays, or tuples, or something else be likely to be faster? It's
interesting that running it on my 8 y.o. Core 2 Duo and my 2 y.o. Core I5
result in virtually exactly the same speed. Weird. Obviously, it's just
doing simple math, pretty much

-- 
Keith
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