{"id":214,"date":"2002-04-25T18:43:32","date_gmt":"2002-04-26T02:43:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ogre.nu\/wp\/?p=214"},"modified":"2004-10-20T08:52:03","modified_gmt":"2004-10-20T16:52:03","slug":"my-pet-programming-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/?p=214","title":{"rendered":"my pet programming project"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over several years now I have worked sporadically to catalog hypothetical <a href=\"\/soccer.html\">fullerenes<\/a> &#8212; i.e. convex closed surfaces built of pentagons and hexagons.  Last year I tossed out my old work in C to start over in Python, whose list primitive and transparent memory management made it easier to extend and generalize the project, which I now describe as <i>enumerating and classifying roughly-convex surfaces formed of roughly-equilateral triangles<\/i>.  The primary goal, I suppose, is to practice my programming; another is to build a database of nonspherical &#8220;geodesic dome&#8221; shapes.<\/p>\n<p>I had the idea of working the search tree in horizontal bands: find all forms with up to N vertices, saving the partial solutions for the next pass, which would read them from a file and build on them the forms with up to N+8 vertices, and so on.  But my programming studies never touched on file i\/o beyond the crudest, so I let that aspect sit until I learned more.<\/p>\n<p>Recently I learned about Python&#8217;s <i>shelve<\/i> module, a transparent database interface which seemed just the ticket .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. until the partials file ate all the free space on my disc!  &lt;voice=&#8221;Marvin the Martian&#8221;&gt;Back to the drawing board.&lt;\/voice&gt;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over several years now I have worked sporadically to catalog hypothetical fullerenes &#8212; i.e. convex closed surfaces built of pentagons and hexagons. Last year I tossed out my old work in C to start over in Python, whose list primitive &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/?p=214\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,19,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mathematics","category-mememe","category-neep-neep"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}