January 30, 2002: Here's puzzle/game I call Traffic Jam. It's modeled after the original plastic version, RushHour, by Binary Arts. The objective is to free the target car by moving those that are blocking it's way. Vehicles can move only in the direction of their long axis. A simple case with the objective of moving the red car to the exit looks like this:
February 10, 2002: I've been playing with Doodler 2 for several days. (Doodler 1 was posted about a month ago.) Printing and rotating drawings is working fine, but kaleidoscope drawing is driving me crazy!
I decided to take a break and work on a few simpler programs. One is an arithmetic drill program modeled after Arithmattack, a Javascript program posted at the Argonne National Laboratory website. My beta tester (aka wife) complained about my use of * and / for multiply and divide. That led to today's posting - a FontViewer written to find those elusive × and ÷ symbols. It could also be useful if you need the ™, ©, ®, or ± symbols which are buried in most fonts. I used the OnDrawCell event exit to display fonts in a Stringrid, so decided to post it over in Delphi-Techniques as an example of this Stringgrid drawing technique.
February
13, 2002: Here's the Arithmattack!
drill program I mentioned the other day. It's a timed drill
to see how many basic arithmetic problems can be solved in 60 seconds with
user control of the range of values and the operations. My first
thought was that the timing aspect wasn't good, but I've changed my
mind. We all need to learn to think under pressure, and
this is low-pressure pressure. Problems can be very simple to
start and should build confidence. See what you think.
February
15,2002: What would the Olympics be without rings? Here's an Olympic
Rings puzzle that challenges you to place one of the digits 1-9 in
each of the areas formed by the overlapping rings so that the sum of the
digits in each ring is the same. This is mainly a programming
exercise, but you can print a copy of the rings if you want to exercise your
brain (and delay Alzheimer's).
February 21: 2002: From an old ACM Programming Contest, here's a problem I call Slimps, Slumps and Slurpies. These are strings of characters following certain formation rules. The definitions are recursive, meaning that the rules may include the terms being defined. The idea is to write a program that recognizes each type. Kind of a compiler for the "Slurp" language
March
1, 2002: I ran across this entry the other day in my
"Unanswered questions" file:
"Championship golf courses always contain 18 holes with par scores of 3, 4,
and 5 with a total course par of 72. How many possible championship
course arrangements are there?" Here's a 40 line Delphi "GolfCourses"
program that answers the question. It involves our old friends
Permutation and Combination. If you want to be a good puzzle solver and
don't know them, it may be time to get acquainted.
Not that it matters, but I haven't been able to find a definition of "championship golf course" to verify that the premise of the question is true.
| March 7, 2002: Doodler 2, a drawing program with fill, rotate-draw, and kaleidoscope draw features is available! And you can now also save and print the masterpieces you create. |