|
Sunday, Jan 14, 2001
Delphi For Fun
Newsletter #11
I hope everyone had a pleasant holiday season.
I sure did. Here's the info on postings in the last
month.
January 14, 2001: The logo contest is over. The good news - every contestant is a winner! I'll be contacting you all in the next few days to find where to send your check or software. The bad news is only for those you who didn't get around to submitting an entry. Aren't you sorry now? (My daughter Amy has a procrastination theory - never put off until tomorrow what you can put off forever. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.) Entries were all excellent and I'll just rotate them around as I get the urge to make a change.
January 12, 2001:
WordStuff
1 is available. This initial release of a word
puzzle solver series includes three dictionaries (small, medium,
large), a dictionary maintenance program, DicMaint,
and a word completion program called Crossword Helper.
It's an exaggeration to call these dictionaries, - they're
actually just word lists, but that's all we need to check
for valid words or to search for words that meet some criteria.
I finished these a couple of days ago, but I've been having so
much fun working on a Cryptogram solver that the
documentation/posting tasks got deferred. An
anagram solver called Unscramble is complete and will
be posted in the next few days.
January 8, 2001: Here is Version 3 of the Towers of Hanoi programming series. This one adds animated graphics. Users can drag disks from peg to peg to solve the program, or watch the disks move as the program solves it. If you're not familiar with the problem, you can check out the description in version 1 here. January 4, 2001: I hope everyone had a holiday season as pleasant as mine. Played in the snow with the grandkids and the dog, helped my 9 year old granddaughter write her first Delphi program, and finally got all 25 balls rolled into the proper holes in the 4-level plastic cube that Santa left in my stocking. I posted the Genaille's Rods program today - it prints a set of "rods" that allow multiplication by inspection. Henri Genaille developed these rods as an improvement of a set designed by John Napier, of logarithm fame, a couple of hundred years earlier. I think they're kind of neat. December 19, 2000: A couple of demo programs are available for download from a new Math Topics article on Graph Searching. The article describes the use of "depth first" and "breadth first" searching for solutions of puzzles which can be represented as graphs. SimpleSearch demonstrates the techniques with a trivial graph and CoinSearch finds solutions to the Sliding Coins puzzle. A quick and dirty TicTacToe Count program is also included which generates all valid board configurations for tic-tac-toe (I think). I get slightly over 6000 valid boards assuming X moves first. If anyone can verify or correct this number, I'd appreciate it.
2500 visitors to date.
"Nothing happens unless first a
dream." -- Carl Sandburg
"Hitch your wagon to a star."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
|
|
|