jst

Posted on 2015-04-02

jst = juggling skill tree

If you have ever played a computer role playing game, you may have noticed the protagonist sometimes has a skill “tree” (most of the time it is actually a directed acyclic graph), where certain skills leads to others. For example, here is the skill tree of sorceress in Diablo II.

Now suppose our hero embarks on a quest for learning all the possible juggling patterns. Everyone would agree she should start with cascade, the simplest nontrivial 3-ball pattern, but what afterwards? A few other accessible patterns for beginners are juggler’s tennis, two in one and even reverse cascade, but what to learn after that? The encyclopeadic Library of Juggling serves as a good guide, as it records more than 160 patterns, some of which very aesthetically appealing. On this website almost all the patterns have a “prerequisite” section, indicating what one should learn beforehand. I have therefore written a script using Python, BeautifulSoup and pygraphviz to generate a jst (graded by difficulties, which is the leftmost column) from the Library of Juggling (click the image for the full size):