What's New -  January, 2013

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 January 4, 2013:  The first posting for the new year examines a couple of interesting characteristics of 2013 posted a few days ago on another website.  It turns out that they are not quite as interesting as the author of that article had thought.   Visit Interesting 2013 for more information and to download the test program. 

January 9, 2013:

Our puzzle calendar this year is called "The Brain Game" and the first week included this  "Word Grid" puzzle:

 "A nine letter word is starts at a corner and spirals into the center. Fill in the missing letters to find out what it is."

Harder than it looks, but I say that it ain't cheatin' if I write the program that solves it!  Find the solution or better yet, check out for yourself the 100 lines or so of user written code that solves it in the Word Grid program in the Delphi Techniques section of DFF.
 

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January 15, 2013:   I spent most of the past week trying to improve our Sudoku Helper/Solver program to provide more complete hints.  No success yet - the routine which identifies valid numbers for each cell and displays the hints is called from 21 places in the program and I couldn't fix one without breaking another.  So I'm moving on to Plan B, but in the meantime Sudoku Version 3.1 fixes an annoying display problem for systems using enlarged text and also adds the missing "Congratulations" display when the user completes a puzzle.        

A solved puzzle board

January 22, 2013:  Here is a game and a puzzle based on it.  The game is Paletto, an interesting  board game developed and marketed in Europe.   It involves removing colored markers from a random board following a couple of simple rules.  The puzzle suggested by a German DFF viewer and owner of the game,  involves placing all of the tiles on the board using a couple of different, but still simple, rules.  See Paletto Puzzle for more details
 

January 26, 2013:  Here is the January 23, 2013 puzzle in our "Brain Game" page-a-day calendar for this year :
 "NAIL BITING REFRESHES THE FEET" is an anagram for what common adage?
By using length and  letter counts as an identifying "fingerprint" and the help of some "common adage"  web search results, the puzzle was solvable even without a program.   However future such puzzles should be easier to solve using this simple "Adage Anagrams" program which does the fingerprint checking against a downloaded list of adages ("Adage.txt" file included in the downloads).  

On a different note, a spammer has discovered that my feedback link does minimal validation before submitting.  I've received 75+ spam emails by that route in the past 24 hours.  I've added some validation to the fields which may help, but if not, expect one of those "prove you are a human" mechanisms to show up on the feedback page soon.