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As of October, 2016, Embarcadero is offering a free release
of Delphi (Delphi
10.1 Berlin Starter Edition ). There
are a few restrictions, but it is a welcome step toward making
more programmers aware of the joys of Delphi. They do say
"Offer may be withdrawn at any time", so don't delay if you want
to check it out. Please use the
feedback link to let
me know if the link stops working.
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Mensa®
Daily Puzzlers
For over 15 years
Mensa Page-A-Day calendars have provided several puzzles a year
for my programming pleasure. Coding "solvers" is most fun,
but many programs also allow user solving, convenient for "fill
in the blanks" type. Below are Amazon links to the
two most recent years.
Mensa®
365 Puzzlers Calendar 2017
Mensa®
365 Puzzlers Calendar 2018
(Hint: If you can
wait, current year calendars are usually on sale in January.)
Contact
Feedback:
Send an
e-mail with your comments about this program (or anything else).
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Problem Description
Find the word in this partially filled grid which starts in one corner and
circles the board to end in the center square.
Background & Techniques
Here's the puzzle from the January 3 puzzle in "The Brain Game", our daily
puzzle calendar for 2013. (My rule is that I can use any program I have
written as a brain extender J!)
"A nine letter word is starts at a corner and
spirals into the center. Fill in the missing letters to find out what it is."
For different puzzles, click on the grid to enter edit mode, key in the new
changes,
then press the "Make templates" button to exit edit
mode and start solving. Click the "Search templates " button to search
the dictionary for the matching word.
Non-programmers are welcome to read on, but may want to jump to bottom of
this page to download the executable program now.
Programmer's Notes:
For future reference, here are few tips and techniques used in this program .
 | The strategy for solving the problem is to generate the 8 possible word
templates for words starting each of the 4 corners proceeding clockwise or
counterclockwise around the grid before ending with the letter in the
center. Then we'll use our UDict unit to retrieve all 9 letter
words in the largest dictionary ( "Full.dic") and check each word
against each template looking for those that have matching letters in
positions where the letters in the template are known. |
| If we make a string of letters and ? characters starting in the
top left corner and concatenate (join together) the top row, the last
column, the bottom row from right to left and the first column from bottom
to top we have the first 8 letter template.
 | {make a clockwise string around the border
from top left corner}
scw:=cells[0,0]+cells[1,0]+cells[2,0]+cells[2,1]+cells[2,2]
+cells[1,2]+cells[0,2]+cells[0,1]; |
| The corresponding template in the other direction is simply the
first template reversed. Function "ReverseString" in
Delphi's StrUtils unit does exactly what we need.
sccw:= reverseString(scw); |
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| To get the template starting form the next corner, all we must do is
move the first two characters to the end of the string. (e.g.
s:=copy(s,3,6)+copy(s,1,2);) Repeat that
3 times, add that center character, and we have all 4 templates for one direction. Do the same
thing on the reversed string and we'll have the 4 counterclockwise templates. |
| A dictionary named PubDic is automatically created by the UDict
unit. Function LoadLargeDic is called to load the large
dictionary, prompting you for the location if it is not in the same folder
as the program. The dictionary is remembered from run to
run in file Dic.ini. Delete this file to specify a
dictionary from a different location. |
| A call to Pubdic.Setrange procedure will tell the dictionary that
you want to sequentially retrieve all 9 letter words starting with letters
"A" though "Z". Then a "While GetNextWord" loop will retrieve
each
word and return True until all have been processed. |
| We pass each word retrieved against all 8 templates, discarding any word
with a character which does not have the same letter or a ? in the template.
A solution is any word which pass the matching test for all 9 letters. |
| An OnDrawCell event exit is used to center the character in the center
of each grid cell by placing the top left corner at the center of the cell
minus half of the character's width and half the character's height like
this: with rect do textout((left + right -
textwidth(s)) div 2, (top + bottom -textheight(s)) div 2, s); |
| To allow changes to the grid, the editor features must be enabled but in
edit mode the currently selected cell is highlighted and displayed in the
default location, distracting for normal usage. To avoid the
distraction when not editing, I added an OnClick event exit with this
statement to add the GoAlwaysShowEditor option to the set of grid
options when the user clicks on the grid: with
stringgrid1 do options:=options + [goAlwaysShowEditor];
The "Make templates" button turns the option off again to restore the
normal display by subtracting the option from the set. |
Running/Exploring the Program
Suggestions for Further Explorations
 |
??? |
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| Original: January 4, 2013 |
Modified:
May 15, 2018 |
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