July 28, 2002:   I've spent most of this past week adding an explanation facility to my "Logic Puzzle Solver" program.  It solves most of those logic puzzles found in  Logic Puzzle magazines  from Dell Publications.  It will take another week or so of polishing, and we have the back-east  grandkids visiting next week, so I decided to post this beginner's level T-Shirt program to fill the gap.  T-Shirt #5 helps us find the smallest 3 (or 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9)-digit emirp  for the front of our shirt. 

July 23, 2002:  Today,  I added a long needed Google "site search"  feature to the left border of each page over in  the Programs section.   With more than  100 programs now (Google has indexed  300 pages),  I'm having trouble locating things, and I put them there!  Send me feedback if you have any problems.  

July 22, 2002:  Some kids wanted to set up a lemonade stand to make money. To set themselves apart from the other lemonade stands on the block, they decided to sell their lemonade by the pound. They found an old balance beam scale, the kind with a weight pan on each side, and three weights. They discovered that they could sell any whole number of pounds from 1 to 13. What weights did they have.?  Weights #1 searches for the answer to this question for any number of weights from 1 to 5.  There's also a scale where you can practice with things of unknown weight,  I guess they could be lemonade containers.

July 15, 2002:  Here's a small puzzle that I've named Solitaire for Squares.   No chance involved here, just a little thought and perseverance.   Remove the Spades and Hearts from a deck on cards.  Layout the 13 Spades in order Ace through King.  Place a Heart on each Spade so that the sum of each Spade-Heart pair is a perfect square (4, 9,16, or 25).   Just to prove that it knows how, the program will provide hints if you really get stuck.  

July 13, 2002:  A Magic Cube is a logical extension of a magic square into the third dimension.  Here's a Magic Cube  program that doesn't haven't have much user interaction, but it does search, (and find),  all 192 semi-perfect magic cubes of order 3.   They are not quite perfect because the diagonals on each face cannot be made to  sum to the required magic constant, 42.   But the 31 rows, columns, pillars, and space diagonals (corner to opposite corner through the center number)  all can.   By the way, the smallest cube that can be perfect  is 8x8x8.   Beware!  For a small percentage of the population, playing with magic squares, cubes, and hyper-cubes  may be addictive!