Delphi For Fun Newsletter #28[Home]
Friday August
16, 2002
It's mid-August
and mid-drought here in the mountains of southwest
Virginia. In the garden, the beans have come and
gone, tomatoes and corn are coming on, and we're swamped
with cucumbers as usual. A neighbor has had problems
with the local bear in his beehives - we've seen him (the bear) crossing
our yard a time or two, but no damage yet - a real
mean shout sends him scampering off. Cubs born 18 months
ago now weigh 100 lbs.
or so and are on their own for the first time. Some
of them need a little educating about what is
acceptable behavior. Summer grandkid visits are over
and things are getting back to normal.
I've been
spending an early hour or so each day working in
the garden or on
our winter wood supply. The afternoon summer
heat provides a good excuse to stay inside and play on
the computer. I managed
to crank out nine new fun programs since last
time - give them a try!
Here are the
"What's New" items:
July 13, 2002: A Magic Cube is a logical extension of a magic square into the third dimension. Here's a Magic Cube program that doesn't haven't have much user interaction, but it does search, (and find), all 192 semi-perfect magic cubes of order 3. They are not quite perfect because the diagonals on each face cannot be made to sum to the required magic constant, 42. But the 31 rows, columns, pillars, and space diagonals (corner to opposite corner through the center number) all can. By the way, the smallest cube that can be perfect is 8x8x8. Beware! For a small percentage of the population, playing with magic squares, cubes, and hyper-cubes may be addictive!
July 15, 2002: Here's a small puzzle that I've named Solitaire for Squares. No chance involved here, just a little thought and perseverance. Remove the Spades and Hearts from a deck on cards. Layout the 13 Spades in order Ace through King. Place a Heart on each Spade so that the sum of each Spade-Heart pair is a perfect square (4, 9,16, or 25). Just to prove that it knows how, the program will provide hints if you really get stuck.
July 22, 2002: Some kids wanted to set up a lemonade stand to make money. To set themselves apart from the other lemonade stands on the block, they decided to sell their lemonade by the pound. They found an old balance beam scale, the kind with a weight pan on each side, and three weights. They discovered that they could sell any whole number of pounds from 1 to 13. What weights did they have.? Weights #1 searches for the answer to this question for any number of weights from 1 to 5. There's also a scale where you can practice with things of unknown weight, I guess they could be lemonade containers.
July 23, 2002: Today, I added a long needed Google "site search" feature to the left border of each page over in the Programs section. With more than 100 programs now (Google has indexed 300 pages), I'm having trouble locating things, and I put them there! Send me feedback if you have any problems.
July 28, 2002: I've spent most of this past week adding an explanation facility to my "Logic Puzzle Solver" program. It solves most of those logic puzzles found in Logic Puzzle magazines from Dell Publications. It will take another week or so of polishing, and we have the back-east grandkids visiting next week, so I decided to post this beginner's level T-Shirt program to fill the gap. T-Shirt #5 helps us find the smallest 3 (or 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9)-digit emirp for the front of our shirt.
August 7, 2002: Well, it took 18 years, but here at last is the Logic Problem Solver program. Actually, I haven't been working on it for that long but I last compiled the original Turbo Pascal version in 1994. I converted it to Delphi and Windows and added the user interface a couple of years ago. This past month I finally worked up the courage to delve back in and make the 5000+ lines of code suitable for posting. The program solves those: "Jeff has red hair. Kaitlin is 11. Who won the World Series?" type of logic word problems. There are three ways to play with the program: as a "Solver" you need to extract enough facts and rules from the included sample problems so that the program can figure out the solution. As an "Author" you can enter new problem descriptions. And finally, as a "Programmer" you can try to figure out how the heck it works (and perhaps make it work better).
August 10, 2002: Here's a program that solves "The Know-Don't Know Logic Problem", sometimes called "The Impossible Problem" or "The Sum-Product Problem".
It takes a little convoluted reasoning to solve it and most explanations left me slightly puzzled. My approach includes the best explanation you'll find (he said immodestly :>)).
August 11, 2002:
While developing the "Know-Don't Know" program I fixed
a silly timing problem in the U_Primes unit which
tests for primality. The IsPrime function now
runs about 100 times faster than it did last week. I
posted the fix today over in Prime Factors 1 where
U_Primes originally appeared.
August 16, 2002: An Oscilloscope program driven by sound card inputs has been on my list for quite a while. I finally bit the bullet and did it this week. Here's A Simple Oscilloscope program that is just that.
If you use a microphone for input and click your tongue and the "Stop Display" button at the same time, you can prove for yourself that there are really two distinct sounds generated - one when your tongue leaves the roof of your mouth and the other when it slaps the floor (of your mouth :>)). ____________________
Gary Darby
"To avoid criticism...Do nothing...Say
nothing...Be nothing!" -- Elbert Hubbard
"Even the turtle never got anywhere without sticking his neck out" -- Unknown
"Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin
it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it."
Goethe
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