Python for Fun

Purpose of this Collection

This collection is a presentation of fairly small Python programs. They are aimed at intermediate programmers; people who have studied Python and are fairly comfortable with basic recursion and object oriented techniques. Most programs are very short, not more than a couple of pages and all projects are accompanied with a write-up.

I have found Python to be an excellent language to express algorithms clearly. Some of the ideas here originated in other programs in other languages. But in most cases I developed code from scratch from just an outline of an idea. But one, Lisp in Python was almost a translation exercise from John McCarthy's original Evalquote in Lisp.

From many years of programming these are some of my favorite programs. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do. I look forward to hearing from readers, especially those with suggestions for improvements, ideas for new projects, or people who are doing similar things. You can email me at mailme.html

Many thanks to Paul Carduner and Jeff Elkner for their work on this page, especially for Paul's graphic of Psyltherin (apologies to Harry Potter) and to the teams behind reStructured text and Sphinx to which the web pages in this collection have been adapted.

Chris Meyers - Sep 26, 2017

The Collection

• New Projects Looking for Exposure
• How Compilers Do It *
• Dijkstra's Shortest Paths *
• Functional Python (the 8 queens puzzle) *
• 1 Player Games (Python plays Sudoku) *
• Dynamic Programming in Python *


• Pygame Animation of Algorithms
• Pygame support library *
• Minimum Spanning Tree *
• Dijkstra's Shortest Paths *
• K-means (Clustering Nodes) *
• Logic Circuits with Pygame Animations *


• Text Processing
• A Small, Simple and Fast Spelling Checker *
• The Soundex Algorithm
• Parallel Pattern Matching


• Simulations
• Chaos in Action. Feigenbaum bifurctions
• The Monty Hall problem. Where intuition fails.


• Simulator for Toy Computer
• Assembler for Toy Computer
• Compiler for Toy Computer


• Logic Circuits
• Logic Circuits (more)
• Logic Circuits with Pygame Animations *
• Erlang for Python Programmers
• Erlang Concurrency: Logic Circuits revisted


• Game Playing - Animation
• Lode Runner with Pygame Graphics *
• Lode Runner: A Simple Video Game (text version)


• Game Playing - Heuristic Algorithms
• Functional Python (the 8 queens puzzle) *
• 1 Player Games (Python plays Sudoku) *
• 2 Player Board Games (like checkers and chess) *
• Tiles Puzzle. The A* Algorithm vs Greedy *


• Other languages emulated in Python
• Forth in Python
• Lisp in Python
• Prolog in Python (Introduction)
• Prolog in Python (Part 1)
• Prolog in Python (Part 2)
• Prolog in Python (Part 3)


• Gui and Database Programming
• Using SQL with Python
• Building a GUI with Tkinter
• Using SQL with the GUI
• Building a GUI with wxPython


• Miscellaneous Projects
• Dynamic Programming in Python
• Closures and Decorators in Python
• Classic AI. Semantic Information Retrival
• Queues, Trees and Water Buckets
• Towers of Hanoi
• Animal Trees
• Squeezing Bits. Huffman Data Compression
• Natural Language Processing
• Waves and Harmonics