norvig / pytudes
Python programs, usually short, of considerable difficulty, to perfect particular skills.
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Repository Summary (README)
Previewpytudes
"An étude (a French word meaning study) is an instrumental musical composition, usually short, of considerable difficulty, and designed to provide practice material for perfecting a particular musical skill." — Wikipedia
This project contains pytudes—Python programs, usually short, for perfecting particular programming skills.
Who is this for?
To continue the musical analogy, some people think of programming like Spotify: they want to know how to install the app, find a good playlist, and hit the "play" button; after that they don't want to think about it. There are plenty of other tutorials that will tell you how to do the equivalent of that for various programming tasks—this one won't help. But if you think of programming like playing the piano—a craft that can take years to perfect—then I hope this collection can help.
Index of Jupyter (IPython) Notebooks
For each notebook you can hover on the title to see a description, or click the title to view on github, or click one of the letters in the left column to launch the notebook on Colab, Deepnote, Mybinder, Sagemaker, or NBViewer.
| Run | Year | New |
|---|---|---|
| C D M N S | 2026 | Truncatable Primes |
| C D M N S | 2025 | Advent of Code 2025 |
| C D M N S | 2025 | Advent of Code 2025: AI LLM Edition |
| C D M N S | 2024 | Advent of Code 2024 |
| C D M N S | 2024 | Counting Cluster Sizes in Paint by Numbers |
| C D M N S | 2024 | LLMs, Theory of Mind, and Cheryl's Birthday |
| C D M N S | 2024 | Number Bracelets Game |
| C D M N S | 2024 | Overtime in American Football |
| C D M N S | 2024 | Stubborn number endings |
| C D M N S | 2024 | The Languages of English, Math, and Programming |
| Run | Year | Programming Examples |
|---|---|---|
| C D M N S | 2022 | AlphaCode Automated Programming |
| C D M N S | 2022 | The Babylonian Number System |
| C D M N S | 2018 | Beal's Conjecture Revisited |
| C D M N S | 2020 | Bicycling Statistics |
| C D M N S | 2018 | Can't Stop |
| C D M N S | 2019 | Chaos with Triangles |
| C D M N S | 2017 | Conway's Game of Life |
| C D M N S | 2020 | Generating and Solving Mazes |
| C D M N S | 2024 | The Languages of English, Math, and Programming |
| C D M N S | 2021 | Mel's Konane Board |
| C D M N S | 2020 | Photo Focal Lengths |
| C D M N S | 2018 | Pickleball Tournament |
| C D M N S | 2017 | Project Euler Utilities |
| C D M N S | 2022 | Selecting Names from a Menu |
| C D M N S | 2020 | Tracking Polls: Electoral Votes |
| Run | Year | Advent of Code |
|---|---|---|
| C D M N S | 2025 | Advent of Code 2025: AI LLM Edition |
| C D M N S | 2025 | Advent of Code 2025 |
| C D M N S | 2024 | Advent of Code 2024 |
| C D M N S | 2023 | Advent of Code 2023 |
| C D M N S | 2022 | Advent of Code 2022 |
| C D M N S | 2021 | Advent of Code 2021 |
| C D M N S | 2020 | Advent of Code 2020 |
| C D M N S | 2018 | Advent of Code 2018 |
| C D M N S | 2017 | Advent of Code 2017 |
| C D M N S | 2016 | Advent of Code 2016 |
| C D M N S | 2022 | Advent of Code Utilities |
| Run | Year | Probability and Uncertainty |
|---|---|---|
| C D M N S | 2019 | Effectiveness of Language Models |
| C D M N S | 2018 | A Concrete Introduction to Probability |
| C D M N S | 2016 | Probability, Paradox, and the Reasonable Person Principle |
| C D M N S | 2020 | Estimating Probabilities with Simulations |
| C D M N S | 2023 | The Diamond Game: A Probability Puzzle |
| C D M N S | 2019 | The Devil and the Coin Flip Game |
| C D M N S | 2020 | Dice Baseball |
| C D M N S | 2018 | Economics Simulation |
| C D M N S | 2024 | Overtime in American Football |
| C D M N S | 2012 | Poker Hand Ranking |
| C D M N S | 2020 | The Unfinished Game .... of Risk |
| C D M N S | 2019 | WWW: Who Will Win (NBA Title)? |
| Run | Year | Logic and Number/Counting Puzzles |
|---|---|---|
| C D M N S | 2024 | Counting Cluster Sizes in Paint by Numbers |
| C D M N S | 2014 | Cryptarithmetic |
| C D M N S | 2018 | Euler's Sum of Powers Conjecture |
| C D M N S | 2020 | Four 4s, Five 5s, and Countdowns |
| C D M N S | 2020 | How to Count Things |
| C D M N S | 2021 | KenKen (Sudoku-like Puzzle) |
| C D M N S | 2024 | Number Bracelets Game |
| C D M N S | 2019 | Pairing Socks |
| C D M N S | 2018 | Sicherman Dice |
| C D M N S | 2014 | Sol Golomb's Rectangle Puzzle |
| C D M N S | 2024 | Stubborn number endings |
| C D M N S | 2021 | Star Battle (Sudoku-like Puzzle) |
| C D M N S | 2006 | Sudoku |
| C D M N S | 2021 | Sudoku: 100,000 puzzles/second in Java |
| C D M N S | 2020 | Square Sum Puzzle |
| C D M N S | 2020 | When is Cheryl's Birthday? |
| C D M N S | 2015 | When Cheryl Met Eve: A Birthday Story |
| C D M N S | 2024 | LLMs, Theory of Mind, and Cheryl's Birthday |
| C D M N S | 2015 | xkcd 1313: Regex Golf |
| C D M N S | 2015 | xkcd 1313: Regex Golf (Part 2: Infinite Problems) |
| Run | Year | Word Puzzles |
|---|---|---|
| C D M N S | 2020 | Boggle / Inverse Boggle |
| C D M N S | 2020 | Chemical Element Spelling |
| C D M N S | 2020 | Equilength Numbers: FOUR = 4 |
| C D M N S | 2017 | Gesture Typing |
| C D M N S | 2017 | Ghost: A Word game |
| C D M N S | 2018 | How to Do Things with Words: NLP in Python |
| C D M N S | 2015 | Let's Code About Bike Locks |
| C D M N S | 2023 | One Letter Off |
| C D M N S | 2017 | Scrabble: Refactoring a Crossword Game Program |
| C D M N S | 2020 | Spelling Bee |
| C D M N S | 2017 | Translating English into Propositional Logic |
| C D M N S | 2020 | Wordle, Evil Wordle, Antiwordle, and Jotto |
| C D M N S | 2022 | Winning Wordle |
| C D M N S | 2017 | World's Longest Palindrome |
| C D M N S | 2020 | World's Shortest Portmantout Word |
| C D M N S | 2018 | xkcd 1970: Name Dominoes |
| Run | Year | The Riddler (from 538) |
|---|---|---|
| C D M N S | 2022 | Anigrams: Word Chains |
| C D M N S | 2017 | Battle Royale |
| C D M N S | 2021 | Climbing Wall |
| C D M N S | 2021 | CrossProduct |
| C D M N S | 2020 | Flipping Cards; A Guessing Game |
| C D M N S | 2019 | Lottery |
| C D M N S | 2019 | How Many Soldiers to Beat the Night King? |
| C D M N S | 2017 | Misanthropic Neighbors |
| C D M N S | 2018 | Properly Ordered Card Hands |
| C D M N S | 2021 | Race Track |
| C D M N S | 2021 | Split the States |
| C D M N S | 2020 | Tour de 538 |
| C D M N S | 2020 | Weighing Twelve Balls |
| C D M N S | 2020 | War. What is it Good For? |
| Run | Year | Computer Science Algorithms and Concepts |
|---|---|---|
| C D M N S | 2017 | BASIC Interpreter |
| C D M N S | 2017 | Convex Hull Problem |
| C D M N S | 2023 | Docstring Fixpoint Theory |
| C D M N S | 2020 | Stable Matching Problem |
| C D M N S | 2017 | Symbolic Algebra, Simplification, and Differentiation |
| C D M N S | 2017 | Snobol: Bad Grade, Good Experience |
| C D M N S | 2018 | Traveling Salesperson Problem |
| C D M N S | 2026 | Truncatable Primes |
Index of Python Files
| File | Description | Documentation |
|---|---|---|
| beal.py | Search for counterexamples to Beal's Conjecture | documentation |
| docex.py | An obsolete framework for running unit tests, similar to doctest | |
| ibol.py | An Exercise in Species Barcoding | documentation |
| lettercount.py | Convert Google Ngram Counts to Letter Counts | documentation |
| lis.py | Lisp Interpreter written in Python | documentation |
| lispy.py | Even Better Lisp Interpreter written in Python | documentation |
| lispytest.py | Tests for Lisp Interpreters | |
| pal.py | Find long palindromes | documentation |
| pal2.py | Find longer palindromes | documentation |
| pal3.py | Find even longer palindromes | documentation |
| pytudes.py | Pre-process text to generate this README.md file. | |
| py2html.py | Pretty-printer to format Python files as html | |
| SET.py | Analyze the card game SET | documentation |
| spell.py | Spelling corrector | documentation |
| sudoku.py | Program to solve sudoku puzzles | documentation |
| testaccum.py | Tests for my failed Python accumulation display proposal | documentation |
| yaptu.py | Yet Another Python Templating Utility |
Etudes for Programmers
I got the idea for the "etudes" part of the name from this 1978 book by Charles Wetherell that was very influential to me when I was first learning to program. I still have my copy, but it is now easier to find a pdf than a hard copy.
Reviews of pytudes
Here's what some people are saying about pytudes:
- "What I find interesting is how Peter builds bottom-up solutions using low-level utilities... Reading his code is educational." - Jeremey Howard, co-founder of fast.ai and chief scientist at Kaggle
- "Everything I see from Peter Norvig is just always so incredibly well written and coded." — Jonathan, Hacker News
- "Peter Norvig is my go to recommendation when someone is interested in becoming better at solving day to day problems ... I feel his skill of dividing a problem into small pieces and expressing them in code in a natural way is unparalleled." — mikevin, Hacker News
- "I've never seen Peter Norvig choose anything but the most elegant and perfect data model for the problem at hand." — spoonjim, Hacker News
- "I just find Norvig's style of "functional Python" lovely in its own way (with noted disregard of Pep8 and other "best practices")" —raverbashing, Hacker News
- "You should check out Norvig's design of computer programs course on Udacity where he uses these kinds of puzzle programs to teach programming design concepts. It is a hard but really rewarding course. — nafizh, HN ACademy
- "Often enough I would think of something [a possible improvement[, but if you worked it out in detail there was some less-obvious reason the code was the way it was... All the code is pretty short, and it's not really 'production code', but it's enough to be an education in craftsmanship at every level."
- [What code samples should programmers read?] "Anything else implemented by Norvig, he's one of the best programmers that I've had the pleasure of reading code from." - jacquesm on Hacker News
- "Everything I see from Peter Norvig is just always so incredibly well written and coded. Every year looking at his solutions for advent of code [0] brings just so much learnings. Strongly recommend. - jyepin Hacker News
- "I feel his skill of dividing a problem into small pieces and expressing them in code in a natural way is unparalleled." - mikevin Hacker News