What's New -  April, 2013

[Home]

April 2, 2013:  DFF Newsletter #67 was sent yesterday to subscribers.  Newsletters are primarily a listing of the "What's New" items for the quarter. The motivation was to update those who find the site interesting but do not visit routinely.  

The Index of Lazarus conversions is now available as a link from the Lazarus Revisited page.  Also, I just added  the file of adage candidates which was missing from the  Adage Anagrams program download posted in January.     

April 6, 2013:  One more fairly large conversion of Delphi to Lazarus posted today; the 6 individual word based programs (Crossword Helper, Decrypt, Scrambled Pie, Spellbound, Unscramble, and Word Ladder) plus the wrapper, Wordstuff 3,  that links to any of them all wrapped up in a single zip file. I have added some notes to the Lazarus Revisited page.  I've decided to post Lazarus notes there with the latest additions in red.

April 14, 2013: 

Another Brain Game calendar puzzle solver was posted today.  If you are a puzzleist and need help finding the solution to this or a similar puzzle, download the executable version of Expressions From Integers.  If you are a programmer or interested in how a computer program might solve this puzzle and others like it, you might enjoy browsing the text on the web page and/or the downloaded source code. 
 

April 20, 2013: A viewer wrote last week regarding my "Know - Don't Know" program which analyzes a logic puzzle involving two people (usually professors), one given the sum of two numbers and the other given their product.  By exchanging non-numeric messages about what they know or do not know, they both manage to find the numbers.  It is often called the "Impossible Problem" because it seems that that should be the case.  My original versions concentrated on finding the numbers without knowing either the sum or the product, but glossed over how the professors, particularly the one knowing only the sum, might have solved the problem.  Know, Don't Know Version 3 posted today adds a "Walkthrough" page to the the program describing the thought processes of each professor at each exchange leading to them both finding the solution.  It  helped give me, and hopefully Charles and others, a deeper understanding of the problem and its solution.

April 23, 2013: An update to make  Know, Don't Know Version 3.1 today added a second "Walk-through" page, this one interactive, taking any sum and product and stepping through the analysis from each professor's point of view.  This was motivated by a viewer who doubted that the validity of the second solution for the 500 upper limit case.  To eliminate the possibility that of a bug in the original solver code, I needed to step through as the Professors would have done.  The size of the numbers makes this an order of magnitude harder than the first "Walk-through" and justified writing the additional code.