What's New -  June, 2017

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June 8, 2017: FrontPage, the website builder used here at DFF is on life-support and options for recovery seem to be limited.  Long time viewers have heard this song before; the basic problem is that there is no easy way to convert to any other product.  Best advice seems to be "save the text and convert each page manually"; a job that sounds like weeks or months  of "not-so-fun" time to get back to what I have now.     Currently, the only way to update the site use to edit a local copy and upload the revisions via the FTP transfer protocol which has introduced a whole new set of problems for a newbie like me.    

In any event, these are my problems, not yours - just be patient while I learn and search for solutions.  I do have a couple of changes to post - the first is an expansion of our Latitude-Longitude Distance unit and the test program for it,  If you're interested in that sort of thing, here's the link to the  LatLonDistanceTest page with more information.

June 12. 2017: Brute Force is my "go-to" puzzle solver for an amazing number of puzzle types (50 sample puzzles included in the downloads).  It solves by exhaustive search ("trial and error") if they can be described with a set of integer equations with a limited range of solution values.  I recently checked to see if it could solve the "Matchstick" puzzle for which I posted a user-play version a couple of years ago.  It turns that it could, even though I had to add two additional operators to describe partially burned matchsticks.  Brute Force Version 3.5 has the details and download links.