The Countdown Numbers Game

I’ve written about this amazing game before, and presented a solver for it written in Python. That’s not very web accessible though, so I decided to write an HTML/JS/CSS version of the solver and host it on this site.

I don’t know JavaScript that well and so I started by asking ChatGPT to rewrite my Python version in JS for me. It did just that and gave me a good place to start from. It wasn’t perfect of course, since some Python idioms don’t directly translate, but it got me started. Then I proceeded to learn enough JS, HTML and CSS in order to figure out how to make this online tool work the way I wanted it too.

For the Python version I was using a library called SymPy to help to identify duplicate logical expressions and filter them out from the results. There is no immediately available JS equivalent to that that I know of so the JS version will print logical dups if they fall out from the algorithm. I will revisit this at some point, I may end up having to write more code to do that myself.

I added the HTML/JS/CSS code to the existing repo.