https://github.com/juliannicholls/countdown
Ace the Countdown letters rounds with this
https://github.com/juliannicholls/countdown
ruby sinatra
Last synced: about 1 month ago
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Ace the Countdown letters rounds with this
- Host: GitHub
- URL: https://github.com/juliannicholls/countdown
- Owner: JulianNicholls
- License: other
- Created: 2013-09-07T20:19:11.000Z (almost 13 years ago)
- Default Branch: master
- Last Pushed: 2024-02-29T07:29:43.000Z (over 2 years ago)
- Last Synced: 2025-03-03T11:43:35.424Z (over 1 year ago)
- Topics: ruby, sinatra
- Language: Ruby
- Size: 3.11 MB
- Stars: 0
- Watchers: 3
- Forks: 0
- Open Issues: 0
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Metadata Files:
- Readme: README.md
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README
# Countdown
This is a word finder for the UK (originally French) TV gameshow
[Countdown](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countdown_%28game_show%29).
## Word list
It uses a word list constructed from Kevin Atkinson's
[wordlist page](http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/).
I have included the whole copyright file that comes with the download, since
all the component word lists have ultimately been placed in the public domain,
but there are a number of different statements of copyright contained. Clearly,
I am deeply in Kevin's debt for the word list and acknowledge the sterling work
that he has done.
The word list that I have chosen to construct from his files is:
- Level 80, with...
- English and British up to variant 1.
- No possessives ('s), abbreviations, proper names, Roman numerals, or hacker words.
- Word lengths 5 to 9.
I'd say that the word list seems to be at about the right level, because
when Susie Dent uses the pen camera on the dictionary, the word has so far
been found by this program as one of the longest words.
## Bonuses
It works just as well for:
- The teatime teasers at the end of each segment.
- The final conundrum round.
It will also work for crossword anagrams, as long as the solution is one word
of 9 letters, at most.
## Sinatra
There is now a web version using [Sinatra](http://sinatrarb.com),
[Slim](http://slim-lang.com/), and [Sass / SCSS](http://sass-lang.com/). The words
are returned via AJAX using [jQuery](http://jquery.com) in JSON format.
It is available online [here](http://immense-countdown.herokuapp.com/).
## Responsive Display
The web version is now much more responsive to screen sizes, down to a mobile
screen in portrait orientation.
### Operator <=> overloading
The definition for the <=> operator in built-in classes explicitly states that
it returns -1, 0, and +1 for the three comparison possibilities.
It seems that overriding the operator only requires that the return value is \<0, 0, or \>0.
I couldn't find this documented anywhere on the net after much searching, but
I tried it in the end and it seems to work for sort().
Subsequently, I looked at the source code for ruby_qsort() and the comparisons
made are all against 0, so a negative, zero, or positive quantity is fine.