What's New -  June, 2005

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June 13, 2005:  We're packing for a family trip to Germany and Switzerland so DFF will have a hiatus until July.   It sounds like Europe has had a cold, wet spring, so we may come back knowing more about Germanic art, culture, and history than originally planned.  But, with enough good food and beer, sunny mountaintops will just be a  bonus, not a requirement for an enjoyable trip! 

June 9, 2004:  One more Beginner's program from a recent Mensa Puzzle-a-Day calendar.  I called it Expressions864:  Find all solutions where the sum of two numbers equals 864.  And by the way, the solution, including the "864" sum must contain all of the digits 1 through 9 exactly once.  Only about 35 lines of code to solve this one, including a test to eliminate duplicate solutions.  

I did also coded the problem in our Brute Force program and uncovered a small bug there.  In a feeble attempt to eliminate duplicate solutions, I was eliminating any that had a repeated variable value.  But, of course, reusing a single variable value does not mean that the solution is a duplicate.   I have simply removed the uniqueness test for now. 

June 8, 2005:  Here are two more simple little programs that I added to the Beginners Techniques page  in Delphi Techniques.  They do not do much but may illustrate some new techniques for the beginner's repertoire.   DrawDice draws a random pair of dice with each button click.  CountWords lets you load a text file and get a count  and list of the words it contains or a summary of number of occurrences by word.  

June 6, 2005:  Some one posed the Four Dice Puzzle to me the other day.  The problem is to find a set of 4 special six-sided dice which may have more than 6 dots on a side and may repeat the number of dots on a side.  The set, if labeled A  B  C  D,  has the property that when rolled  in pairs, on average, A beats B, B beats C, C beats D and D beats A!   Makes a good non-fair game if you let your opponent choose his die first.   This version lets you set a number of parameters to look for other solution sets and to print the solutions as a deck of playing cards.