Atomic Number Equation to Country Name Puzzle Solver using Python: The Prototype

October 4, 2020

Since I have learned basics of Python with Prof. Vahid in CS111 Introduction to Computer Science 1 course, I have been searching for every opportunities to put my skills at Python to the real world application. And about one year ago, I have written my first program from scratch to solve a real problem. Here's how it went and how the program works !

One night, one of my friends sent this problem into our group chats

There are four mystery elements. The first element's atomic number is less than the second element's atomic number by 39. The second element's atomic number is less than the third element's atomic number by 23. The sum of all four elements' atomic number is 286. In a certain order, these element names will arrange into a country name. Find the country's name.

Thanks to my friend Suwijak Moolchua for this challenging problem.

My friend told me that there is no specific way to solve this, and convinced me to just pick random atomic numbers, turn them into element names, and hope that it gives out the country's name. Suddenly, I thought to myself "What if I solve this problem using Python coding, that would be cool !" Suddenly after that thought, I opened my Spyder and started coding.

Here is the screenshot of the first part of the program:

This is where I turn those word problems into numerical equations. I was planning to random some parameter and let it gives out all of the four atomic numbers. Since the atomic number must be equal or more than 1, and the highest atomic number is 118, I just had to run the random loop from 63 to 95. I redirected these four numbers to the next function which will turn those atomic numbers into element names.

In this part, I painstakingly typed in all of the atomic numbers and element names in list form. The function will return a string of element name after checking one by one using for loop. Lastly, I wrote the second function which would combine those element name strings in every possible combinations for four elements. And after all of these hard works, I ran the code and this was the moment that I have been waiting for.

What to Do in the Future ?

1. This program was builded under many conditions (certain elements etc.) It would be great to implement it so that it takes number of elements in the puzzle and create every possible combinations automatically.
2. It took me quite an amount of time to find the answer in every combinations. Putting every possible country (answers) and run the possible combinations through the list of answers might be able to help us.

Thank you so much for reading ! I wil see you next time !

Ducky Deeow: From the Ground Up - Progress from Beginning until Now

December 5, 2020

After one semester of creating and debugging, the website is now ready to be published ! I am so happy to be able to finally publish this website that I have dreamed of creating for so long. Even though there is so much more work to do to make Ducky Deeow the best website in the world, this is a really big step for me, and I hope that I will be able to continue using my knowledge to improve this website further !

For those who do not know, this website has started as the final project for the course CS103: Introduction to Web Programming and Web Technologies by Professor Vahid Azadeh-Ranjbar at Boston University. In this course, I have learned about basics of web programming, including web programming languages such as HTML, CSS, and JS. We also learned about general knowledges of World Wide Web (Malware, Phishing etc.) and how to make the most out of what World Wide Web has to offer (Search Engine Optimization, Web Analytics, Creative Commons etc.). In each week, there would be assignments for us in the class to improve our skills of writing codes for website, and the development of the final project website is one of the weekly assignments; we have to develop and implement new features and decorations to the website as we learned new techniques in lecture.

So, let us go back and see what does Ducky Deeow version Alpha looks like !

You can use your finger/cursor to swipe through the images below !

Version 1.0 (September 2020): A First Prototype !
Plain text as a part of About Me section

Version 2.0 (October 2020): CSS Implemented !
CSS decoration from scratch

Version 3.0 (October 2020): Big Renovation !
Reworked the layout, created first internal page

Version 4.0 (November 2020): Responsive Design !
Added responsive design with two-column layout

Version 5.0 (December 2020): Now !
Added more JS/CSS effects with folder system reworked

Thank you so much for reading ! I wil see you next time !