site/posts/2015-04-02-juggling-skill-tree.html


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                <h2> jst </h2>
                <p>Posted on 2015-04-02</p>
                    <p>jst = juggling skill tree</p>
<p>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, <a href="http://hydra-media.cursecdn.com/diablo.gamepedia.com/3/37/Sorceress_Skill_Trees_%28Diablo_II%29.png?version=b74b3d4097ef7ad4e26ebee0dcf33d01">here</a> is the skill tree of sorceress in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_II">Diablo II</a>.</p>
<p>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 <a href="http://libraryofjuggling.com/">Library of Juggling</a> 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 <a href="http://python.org">Python</a>, <a href="http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/">BeautifulSoup</a> and <a href="http://pygraphviz.github.io/">pygraphviz</a> to generate a jst (graded by difficulties, which is the leftmost column) from the Library of Juggling (click the image for the full size):</p>
<p><a href="../assets/resources/juggling.png"><img src="../assets/resources/juggling.png" alt="The juggling skill tree" style="width:38em" /></a></p>

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