Part 1 turned solitaire Yahtzee into a dynamic program: work backwards from completed score sheets, take expectations over rolls, and choose the best available action. This post is about making that idea run fast enough to be useful.

I didn’t have a Game Boy growing up, but I did have an electronic handheld Yahtzee. It does exactly one thing, and it does it with an admirable lack of distractions.

IEX is a stock exchange that is most famous for introducing a “speed bump” to deter high-frequency trading (Read about them in Flash Boys). But they also made their exchange data available to a degree that was unheard of by the more traditional players like NYSE and NASDAQ. IEX published both a JSON REST API for current quotes and a daily archive of raw packet captures, free, no credentials required.

For Christmas my brother gave me a toy robotic arm kit, a Raspberry Pi 3, and an Xbox controller. The gift was really the project: he studied electrical engineering in college, and the plan was that he would teach me how to design the circuit that connects those three things together. We spent the rest of the holiday on the couch building it.

Every family has a game. Growing up, we played a lot of Rummy 500, and over Christmas 2016 we played enough of it to develop standings, grievances, and a general reluctance to let the tournament end when everyone went home.