Saturday August 14, 2004


 Delphi For Fun Newsletter #37

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 Well,  summer has nearly flown - it's been 3 months since the last newsletter.  Each issue triggers 50 to 100 rejects from invalid email addresses. full mail boxes, or other assorted reasons.   And my list server isn't smart enough to automatically remove invalid subscribers from the distribution list resulting in a couple of hours of cleanup work with each issue.   Oh well, the price of fame I guess.

We can tell that the Olympics are here - the Olympic Rings puzzle program page has been the most visited DFF website for the past month or so, now averaging over 600 visits per day!  I'm sure that most people are not looking for an Olympic Rings puzzle,  but a small percentage wander on to other pages on the site, so maybe one or two will become Delphi programmers.

By the way,  the Olympic Rings stats came from a daily statistics report for the website.   I posted yesterday's report at http://delphiforfun.org/DFF_daily_stats.htm.  We had visitors from 40 states, 6 Canadian provinces, and 56 countries - a pretty typical day.   Maybe some math teachers can use it to pose some interesting statistics problems.

We visited the Destination Imagination Global Finals at the end of May.  It is easy to get discouraged by world events these days, but seeing the some of our brightest youth in action renews one's faith in the future.  An uplifting experience.

You'll find information below about "Kirkman's 15 Schoolgirls Problem".  It's one of those "easy to state, hard to solve" problems that I really like.  And this one has been a challenge.  I have posted a program that finds lots of solutions, but ,  so far,  identifying  the seven unique solutions eludes  me.   One of of these days (or weeks,  or months), I'll crack it.   

Here's the rest of What's New since last time:

May 22, 2004:   I ran across the following problem recently in my daily Mensa® Puzzle calendar; 

Find the six digit number in which the first digit is one less than the second and one half the third, the fourth digit is one more than the third and is also the sum of the first and second, and the the fifth and six digits make a number which is the sum of the first four digits. The sum of all the digits is 19.

It's an algebra problem, but I thought I'd try to "Brute Force" it just for fun.  Brute Force uses trial and error methods to search for a set of variable values that satisfy a set of equations.   Every Brute Force problem to date had a unique value for each variable.  This problem has at least one repeated value. which required a small modification to the program.  The new version was posted today.  A few additional "Brute Force" type problems  have popped up since the last posting  so there are now  16 samples included.     

Found another pair!

May 24, 2004: Here is my version of the memory card game commonly called Concentration.   The objective is to form pairs from an array of face down cards by drawing two cards in each turn.  Matched cards are removed; unmatched cards are turned back  face down.  When the field is empty,  the player with the most matched pairs is the winner.  This version allows one or two players and setting the deck size from 1 to 20 pairs.

May 25, 2004: We reached  a milestone this week - 200,000 programs downloaded in the past 12 months!  Here are a couple of small program changes posted today:

  • Permutes2 now allows users to display combinations or permutations of subsets from a set of character strings as well as numbers.   (User request.) 

  • A viewer pointed out that the MoonDates program would occasionally skip months when listing the dates of new and full moons for a year.  I think it's fixed. 

 

May 31, 2004:  We just returned from the Destination Imagination Global Competition in Knoxville, TN.  An awesome experience with some awesome kids!   Read more about it and see some pictures here.

June 9, 2004:   I uploaded a revised  version today of the DFF Play CD, a file  that contains executable versions of 60+ programs from this site.  I put it together last December for  use in our schools here.   The file includes an autorun  file to start automatically from a CD but will run fine from a hard drive.  There's a loader program, Programload.exe, used  to select programs by category (Science, Math,  Games, Puzzles, Tricks).  If you run it from hard drive or if auto start is not enabled on your PC, start by double clicking  the loader program.  The zipped  DFF Play CD file  is about 20mb in size.  

 I plan future updates with additions, deletions, and enhanced versions, so pertinent feedback with bugs reports or suggestions will be appreciated as always.  

In the process of updating the CD, I ran across a few typos and minor bugs.  As a result, new versions of Brute ForceCard Trick, and  Magic Matrix programs have been uploaded. 

 

June 11, 2004:  Here's an update to the Computational Geometry page over in Delphi Techniques section that adds the solution to this problem: .  Given a point and a polygon, determine if the point is enclosed by the polygon.    

How to do it?    Hint: Draw a long line from the red dot in this image in any direction that doesn't pass through any vertices.  Notice that your line intersects an even number of polygon edges.

June 14, 2004:  I've been trading problems and puzzles with a bright young lady I met at the Destination Imagination  finals a couple of weeks ago.  She sent me this one  the other day: Insert +, -, x, ÷ symbols into the digits 99999 to make an expression that equals 10.  

It's not too difficult to find one, but I thought she deserved to see all possible solutions.  Besides, I'm trying to convince her programming would be a great career choice.   So here is ExpressionsForBethe, which solves not only this problem but similar problems for any given set of digits evaluating to any given value. 

 

June 17, 2004:  Here's a small update to the Scientific Grapher program  with better default values if two series are being plotted and the ability to control the scale of the dependent variable.  I also added Fermat's Spiral to the sample curve files.  

By the way,  it has been reported that practitioners of omphaloskepsis, (contemplating one's navel), use Fermat's Spiral as their symbol.    I'll admit though, that my search for "Omphaloskepsis" images turned up lots of belly buttons, but few spirals.  

 

July 7, 2004:  For the past several weeks most of my spare programming-for-fun time has been spent  working on Kirkman's Schoolgirl problem.   I haven't cracked it yet, but I will.   It's  time to share the problem so that all you hotshot Delphi programmers can try your hand.

Fifteen girls at a boarding school go for a daily walk.  In order to prevent cliques from forming, the school mistress has declared that the girls will walk each day in 5 rows of 3 and that each girl will walk in a row with each other girl exactly once.    Since each girl must walk aligned with 14 other girls and she walks with 2 different girls each day, it will take seven days to complete the cycle if one exists.   The question is how to line the girls up each day to implement the schoolmarm's wishes.

In fact, there are seven  distinct solutions to the problem - English amateur mathematician Thomas Penyngton Kirkman published the problem and the solutions in 1850!    One DFF viewer, who happens to code in C++, found a brute force solution after about 5 days of CPU time but there are surely more efficient ways.  I just haven't found one in Delphi or Pascal yet.   There is lots of information on the Web and the solutions are all known, but the journey to finding even one solution should fill lots of pleasant hours.   How did Kirkman do it?

 

In the meantime, I posted a modified version of our "Crossword Helper" word completion program and available from the WordStuff1 page or as part of WordStuff2.   The new version includes an "excluded letters" list to reduce the number of words returned when  a partial word is entered.    Not helpful in solving crosswords, but there is an application in finding hidden phrases in the "Flip Words"  commercial game that seems to be floating around the web.     Viewer Frank, who probably spends too much time playing the Flip Words, requested the change because he's addicted  and determined to get a high score..  

  

July12, 2004:  Here's Kirkman1, version 1 of a program to solve  Kirkman's Schoolgirls Problem described last week   It finds lots of solutions, but cannot yet determine which are unique and which are merely renamed & rearranged versions of solutions already found, 

July 23, 2004:  Michael from Demark wrote the other day asking about adding Civil Twilight times to our Solar Position  program that has an option to display Sunrise and Sunset times for any date and location.  I posted the change today.  He's working on a program to display hours of daylight for pilots flying under Visual Flight Rules.    They figure that there is enough light to fly when the sun is  6 degrees or less below the horizon.  

 (Other than that I'm still trying to identify those darn 7 unique Kirkman solutions.  I can filter out many, but not enough of the hundreds that the Kirkman1  program produces)

July 27, 2004:  This problem was published by Marilyn vos Savant in her "Ask Marilyn" column in the weekly "Parade" magazine last Sunday. 

A clueless student faced a pop quiz - a list of 24 Presidents of the 19th century and another list of their terms of office, but scrambled. The object was t match the President with his term. He had to guess every time. On average, how many  terms would he guess correctly?

 I couldn't figure out how to solve it analytically, so I wrote this simple Random Matching program to find the answer experimentally.   40 lines of code make it a good Beginners level program. 

On the Kirkman front - I can now identify the unique solutions!   I hope to get the code integrated to make  Kirkman2 in the next few days.  

August 1, 2004:

  Viewer Dahlia found a bug in our Crossword Generator program.  Non-square boards were filled only to the limit of the smaller dimension.   It's fixed today.  Thanks, Dahlia for "bugging" me until I took the time  from Mr. Kirkman to fix it. 

Viewer Charles Doumar sent me a version of the Kirkman 15 Schoolgirls program that finds solutions much faster than mine.  I added my "uniqueness checking" code to it and it finds the first 6 unique solutions in pretty quickly.  The 7th, and final, unique solution is still hiding after several thousand solutions checked.  (Or else we have a bug -surely that couldn't be!)  

 

August 9, 2004: 

A stick is broken randomly into 3 pieces.  What is the probability that the pieces can be assembled into a triangle? 

Random Triangles answers the question empirically.  Perhaps the answer is not what one would think!

 

Gary Darby
http://www.delphiforfun.org/


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