11.1.1 Defining the Problem

Before you open your editor and begin writing code you need to clearly define your problem. Answering a few questions can help you do this: The last question is as important as the others -- if there is already a PyPedal routine that does similar calculations you can use it as a starting point. Code reuse is a great idea.

The problem that will motivate the rest of this section sounds very tricky, but is not really so bad because we are going to reuse a lot of code. I want to create a routine for drawing pedigrees that color nodes (animals) based on their importance as measured by their connectedness to other animals in the pedigree. After a brief review of the contents of the Module Template in Section 11.2, I will present a detailed solution to this problem in Section 11.3.

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