Delphi For Fun Newsletter #10

[Home]

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Friday, Dec 15, 2000
 
Delphi For Fun Newsletter #10
 
Gosh, 2 weeks since the last newsletter.   I'm not much better at this than I am at social correspondence.   Lots of new stuff though, so I guess it'sfurther evidence that doing it is more fun than writing about it.   Here are the new postings since last time. 

December 14, 2000:  Well, another 4-day Sabbatical has passed,  working on the  Sliding Coins puzzle this time.   Place 3 dimes and 2 quarters in a row like this        Then rearrange the coins to look like this     by sliding adjacent Quarter/Dime or Dime/Quarter pairs of coins  to a new location.  No reversing the order of the coins while dragging!  This is more of a program about drag drop processing than solution searching but worthwhile if you've never wrestled with drag images.    I also developed some good material on  searching  adjacency list representations of graphs.  I'll be posting  that in a day or two.  

Note to H.R. Nazif.  I  have some information for you, but you forgot to include an email address in your feedback response.  Try again.  

December 10, 2000: Two postings today. 

Pi Calc #1 is a Beginners program that estimates Pi by shooting cannonballs randomly into a square field that just contains a round pond and counts how many of the total land in the pond.  Pi is the Greek letter p, our letter P, which they used as an abbreviation for perimeter.  Since Pi is the ratio of of the distance around a circle to the distance across, I guess it makes some sense.   No fancy graphics here - it  takes a million or so shots to get a good estimate, by which time the pond is full and  the field is pretty well buried in cannonballs.

Spring Mass #1 is a new program introducing the physics of spring mass systems.  It animates the motion of a spring with a weight hanging from it when you give it a bump or stretch and release it.   About 300 lines of code puts it in the Intermediate category, but most of that is just setting up the data.  The animation loop has about 30 lines of code.  Would it work in zero gravity? 

December 6, 2000:  BruteForce solves a class of problems with integer solutions.  As the name implies, it uses trial and error to search for solutions.  Word arithmetic problems, Magic Squares (well 3X3 and 4X4), and others like the Bookshelf Problem,  the Olympic Rings problem, and many others.  Check it out. 

 
2200 visitors to date. 

 

_________________________
Gary
http://www.delphiforfun.org
_________________________
 
In honor of the conclusion of our Presidential election: 
 
"One accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions"  Admiral Grace Hooper (early computer pioneer, first to use the word "bug" to describe a programming error)