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 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.
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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