Users were invited to state the next number in a sequence. I was interested in seeing which numbers were skipped or repeated. Resultant graph from scrape at 2013-2-22 13:34 EST: http://i.imgur.com/yOFOfIX.png

RAoA contest research.py

import praw
from collections import Counter
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

useragent='investigating a RAOA post'
r = praw.Reddit(useragent)

def get_comments(subm_id='190wmg'):    
    subm=r.get_submission(submission_id=subm_id)
    c_gen = subm.all_comments_flat
    comments = []
    for c in c_gen:
        comments.append(c.body)
    return comments

def get_vals(comments):
    sequence = Counter()
    for c in comments:
        done = False
        test = c[:5]
        while not done and len(test)>0:
            try:
                val=int(test)
                sequence[val]+=1
                done=True
            except Exception, e:
                test = test[:-1].strip()
                continue
    return sequence

def plot_hist(vals):        
    s = pd.Series(vals) 
    missing = [i for i in range(1,int(s.index.max())+1) if i not in s.index]
    s2 = pd.Series([0]*len(missing), index=missing)
    s=s.add(s2, fill_value=0)
    s.plot(kind='bar')
    plt.show()
    return missing

def main():
    comments = get_comments() 
    vals = get_vals(comments)
    missed = plot_hist(vals)