What's New -  April, 2008

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April 8, 2008:  One week before our big trip to Europe and most all the advanced planning is done.  We're  reading through the guidebooks that we do not plan to carry with us in order to absorb a little more background about the places we'll be visiting. 

I took time to update our Age Problem Solver program  today to include the current Mensa Calendar puzzle and a couple of wording variations of previous puzzles.   I also added two button to help test and debug the program.  One button reloads the parsing tables without restarting the program and the other to  "backtest"  all available problems and display a summary of results.  

April 2, 2008:  Being retired, I don't spend much time in my car listening to radio these days, but I do enjoy NPR's CarTalk program while in my shop on weekends.  One of the best parts is the weekly "Puzzler".  This week's was solved with a simple program that I decided to post as a Beginners level program in our Delphi Techniques section.  Here's a link to the  details and download page for Car Talk Reversed Ages puzzler program. 

April 1, 2008:  A pandigital number by definition contains all of the digits 0 to 9 exactly once.  An "almost: pandigital number is 9 digits long containing 1 to 9 exactly once.    Previous versions of today's program solved a couple of sample problems about these number types mainly as a programming exercise.  Today's update, Pandigitals Version 3.0 answers three additional problems about pandigital numbers proposed by viewers: 

  •  Find a pandigital number in which each subset of the first N digits considered as an integer is exactly divisible by N.  (For example. the number cannot be 1234567890 because even though "1" is divisible by 1, "12" is divisible by 2, and "123" is divisible by 3, "1234" is not divisible by 4.)

  • Find all equations of the form a x b = c with the property that a, b, and c are integers and collectively they form an "almost" pandigital number, i.e. they contain the digits 1 through 9 exactly once. For one example: 12x483 = 5796.

  • Find all "almost" pandigital numbers, using digits 1 thru 9 only once each, with the property that its square contains each digit 1 thru 9 twice.