Smithsonian.com

Play here: Google

You might have noticed that the Olympics are happening. Google noticed too, and it’s been releasing Google Doodles that allow you to compete in the games in your own small way. For most of us, that means about five minutes of  trying to hurdle or canoe or play basketball before we start getting our real work done. For programmers that means trying to beat the Doodle with code.

And, of course, they succeeded. Here’s a video of a programmer using 22 lines of Python to shatter the Google Doodle Olympic world record.

Geek.com has a good summary of how he did it.

At first, he just got the hurdler running in Python and did the jumps manually with the spacebar, recording a time of 10.4 seconds. Then he disregarded the hurdles and managed to complete the course in just 0.4 seconds. Impressive, but that’s not playing properly and only achieved 2 of the 3 possible stars.

The final fully-automated solution is the most impressive and can’t be beaten with a manual run. Automating both the running and jumping saw a time of 1.5 seconds achieved.

And, here’s the basketball one. This one took 48 lines of Python.

No canoeing solution yet — perhaps they got distracted by the real Olympics.

More at Smithsonian.com:

“Doodle 4 Google” Theme Announced

Cooper-Hewitt: Doodle 4 Google Contest