Sweyla

I realize now that this is a historical document and not newly written, so I understand it was a different time back then. However, just for the sake of argument, let's say that it had been newly written. In that case the point isn't that it's irrelevant to women (it's not, since none of the characters had to be male for the story to work), but that women might feel left out of the programming subculture. (Disclosure: I'm a man)

I see. I had the impression it was newly written in a retro style. This makes a lot more sense now and I can appreciate it as a historical document.

That's great in isolation, but the overall score is extremely low here. The ones where the programmer is explicitly male are 2.4, 3.1, 3.2, 3.4, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 6.3, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 8.2, 8.3. In many of the ones where the programmer is gender-neutral, there are often other characters that are referred to as male, such as a manager, a farmer, a prince, a warlord, a corporate executive, a magician and a father.

The only mention of a woman I found was a hostess (!!) in 2.1.

With not a single mention of a female programmer (but many he's and him's), I can't get behind this. Let's be an inclusive community, please.

Here is my immediate suggestion: Show only one palette at a time. By putting incompatible patterns so close, you get a matrix of colors that with high probability do not harmonize well.

I am assuming you have a slightly different algorithm for these three, since the middle one doesn't seem to match the root color's brightness, and they seem to match saturation differently too. Make a choice between these before you generate, and if you want to eliminate this choice, I would go with the one that tries to match brightness/saturation as much as possible.

This caught my eye because I developed my own algorithm for this a few years ago and applied it to syntax highlighting[1].

[1] http://sweyla.com/themes/

Try this implementation for PAVA:

https://gist.github.com/gustavla/9499068

Also, how are you timing Python? When I run this on a sample size of 10 using IPython's %timeit, it takes a few microseconds, which is 2 orders of magnitude from what you report.

No kidding the Active Set solution in Cython is slow, it barely leverages Cython at all! It uses a Python list which is managed by Python and uses none of Cython's static typing.

Implement the algorithm inside a "with nogil" and you will see some nice speed-ups. It won't look pretty, but for certain performance-sensitive code it will be worth it.

Thanks! So glad to hear that!

Really cool. I hadn't seen this game before, but the idea is dear to my heart since a few years back I developed a similar iOS app called Circuit Coder. Sorry for the shameless plug, but if you're into games like this, it might be worth knowing about.

This is correct, well investigated!