What's New -  August 2004

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August 27, 2004:  Another version of the Knight's Tour program, Knight's Tour with Constraints, was posted today.  It allows users to add arbitrary constraints specifying  one or more (move number, column, row) constraints for any auto-solve solution found.      The original problem Ian had was from a programming  challenge posted at another site.  He wondered if I could help.  So did I,  and when we finally got it working, I decided to generalize the code and post it,  just in case anyone else would be interested..  

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!

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!)