Python

Introduction & Scope # When developing a new web service, you may need to do an initial spot test walk through the operations or try to break the service based on the permissible data type values. You could hand craft all the operations, with their respective arguments, into a handful of URLs but that would seem pretty inefficient. I found myself in a similar situation and wanted a programmatic way to walk through the service operations with a specific input data set. To be clear, I am not attempting to recreate a full web service testing application but rather a simple script to spot check responses and catch any bugs in a web service endpoint's handler.

Introduction # If you are already familiar with finite automata, then understanding a Markov chain will not be as hard. If you are not familiar with one, you can think of finite automata as a flowchart, with states and paths leading from one state to another based on some decision being made. An example could be a room with a light switch; there are the two states of having the light on or off. Using the light switch will transition you between the two states.

I was recently working on solving problem 64 for project Euler and one of the needed algorithms was a detection of cycles in a list. This routine works for detecting cycles in lists of cardinality greater than 2. \