Practice your form

Years ago, I learned karate. I never really got into the sparring side of the sport and eventually stopped, but I loved the mindful practice involved in one aspect of it: kata, or 形. The word means ‘form’, and the focus is on quality, not speed, power, or quantity. I spent hours in a squash court at the YMCA in Calgary, learning the elements of karate, one move at a time, very slowly.

Later, teaching Python classes and enjoying the Advent of Code challenges every December, I made some ‘mindful practice’ exercises for my students, mostly geoscientists and engineers. I called them kata.

形 Check out the kata.

Lots to choose from

Today there are 13 challenges, some of them more ‘geo’ than others. Here are some of them:

• sequence — Analyse a sequence of rocks to find patterns. Good first problem.
• wireline — Automatically detect bed boundaries in a density log.
• sample-names — Ah, the realities of data-loading!
• prospecting — Combine information from several map layers.
• photomicrograph — An introduction to image processing and analysis.
• regression — A single-variable machine learning regression problem.

One slightly funky aspect of the challenges is that you have to interact with a web API to play, making HTTP GET requests to read your data and submit your answers. The server will tell you if you got the question right or not.

💡 If you want to try one, this Google Colab notebook will help you get started. Or read on for some tips…

Getting started

To get started, you don’t need an account or anything, the server doesn’t know who you are. Just think up a random-ish key and use that to identify yourself (so the server can match your answer to the data you received).

As a quick example, here’s how you can get the data for the first challenge, called sequence:

import requests

uri = 'https://kata.scienxlab.org/challenge/sequence'

params = {
    'key': 'honey badger'  # Choose a unique-ish key.
}

r = requests.get(url, params)
print(r.text)

Now r.text holds a long text string with your input data.

To send an answer, update the params dictionary with the question number and your answer:

params.update({'question': 1, 'answer': 42})
r = requests.get(url, params)
print(r.text)

The server will tell you how you did. In this case: Incorrect. Your answer is too low.

If you get stuck on a question, you can ask the server for a clue by sending a question number but no answer:

params = {
    'key': 'honey badger',
    'question': 1,
}
r = requests.get(url, params)
print(r.text)

If you decide to give it a go, then good luck and have fun! And if you fancy trying to write a challenge — a challenge in itself! — then check out the kata-dev repo.