May 31, 2002:  A viewer from the Netherlands, informed me today about a possible enhancement to the  Expressions100 program originally posted in November ,2000.   The problem was to:   Insert + and - signs as necessary into the string 123456789 to form an expression that evaluates to 100.     Mark pointed out that allowing a leading minus sign generates one extra solution.   Sure enough, with this change,  there are 12 ways instead of 11.  This is equivalent to specifying the digit string 0123456789 in the problem definition, so it's not exactly the same problem.   But still interesting enough that  I've replaced the original version with Expressions100B that has this "feature".  

May 30, 2002:   We're taking a break after  last week's marathon to finish the Four In A Row program.  Let's build another of our number t-shirt series.  Here's, T-Shirt #4,  which finds the "smallest prime that remains prime when added to its reversal".    Only 30 lines of user Delphi code  here!   

May 26, 2002:  It has been a long "one or two weeks", but here at last is Version 2 of Four In A Row  that was promised back on May 4th.  

This version adds a number of features including:

• User control of board size and winning token row size , 

•  "Suggest" and "Retract" buttons,

• computer play,

• and the ability to control the "IQ" of the program when it is playing or suggesting moves.    

The  program  looks for good moves using the "Knuth/Moore NegMax variation of the alpha-beta minimax game tree search algorithm ".   Whew!   I pretty much understand it now, but I 'd be embarrassed to tell you how many hours were spent debugging those crucial 75 or so lines of code.   The result is a fairly playable game that still leaves plenty of room for enhancement.   Would-be Computer Science students,  have at it.   I'm going to work on beating the program when its IQ is set to 120. 

May 14, 2002:  Thanks to Francis M. for catching a couple of bugs in the source code for  posted programs.  Towers of Hanoi 2 and Towers of Hanoi 3 both used  the integer edit component,  TIntEdit, but it wasn't included.  I've  since decided that, in general,  it's  not a good idea to require specialized components  in other distributed programs and I have generally stopped using them.  I just changed TIntEdit components back to TEdits in the two tower programs and reposted them.    While at it, I changed the ring animation in Tower 3 so that rings now move up off of a peg, across to the receiving peg and then down.   Previous animation had used magic rings that could pass right  through the pegs as they moved in a straight line from one position to the next.

 Also the beginner's Cannon simulation  program had a reference to Unit1 in its Uses clause, even though Unit1 was not referenced or required.  I had renamed Unit1, but somehow the Uses clause hadn't been updated.  So that program has been corrected and reposted also.  

Thanks again Francis. for taking the time to email me.   To all viewers - you can help make this site better if you emulate Francis and  let me know when you find something that doesn't  work.    I'll appreciate it.

May 10, 2002: Here's a beginner's level program that solves a problem with a stack of cannonballs, technically a square pyramidal pentahedron.  (A pentahedron is a  solid with 5  surfaces.)    How big would the stack have to be before you could rearrange the balls into a single square layer?   Pentahedral Cannonball Stacks will give you the answer with a dozen lines of user written code.  (I've included Version 2, about 50 lines longer,  which  also draws a larger copy of the picture you see here.) 

May 9, 2002: This year's World Championship ACM Programming Competition was won by a team from China.     Three man teams  had five hours to work on eight problems sharing one computer.    I glanced at the problems and decided I might get the easiest one (problem #1 I think).    The competitors were the best 64 out of 3000 teams from 1300 universities, so they are some pretty sharp cats.    I'll be interested in seeing  detailed results when they  are available.    Here's a  link to more info.

Also, ran across a well written article at delphi.about.com discussing  considerations and techniques when  resizing forms for various monitor resolutions.   When possible, I've tried to avoid the problem here by restricting form sizes to 640 by 480 pixels.     It would be nice to  seamlessly scale the forms up to larger screen sizes and there are  components that apparently do the job.  They just aren't a standard part of Delphi (yet).

Red wins!

May 6, 2002:  Here is the first version of Four In A Row - an extended version of Tic-Tac-Toe that is played on a 7 by 6 board, requires 4 markers in a row to win, and has the added restriction that columns must be filled from the bottom up.  This is the human vs. human version.  If things work out, we'll build on this framework to add computer play in a week or two.   

May 3,2002:   Macro Cantu, Delphi guru and author of several excellent books, has just made an introductory  text, Essential Delphi,  available as a free PDF file download from  http://www.marcocantu.com/edelphi/.   There is also a downloadable file of associated Delphi source code.   I haven't been through the entire book yet, but if you're a beginner, and maybe even if you are not, it's definitely worth a look.   

May 1, 2002:  Someone asked me the other day if 8 solutions to the standard Eight Queens problem could be placed on a chessboard so as to occupy all 64 squares.  I didn't know the answer,  but I do now.   Even better,  I got to implement the clever Niklaus Wirth algorithm while solving the problem.   Wirth's technique is one of those "lateral thinking" solutions that  makes you say "Wow!  I wish I had thought of that".  The source code for EightQueens_Wirth  is now available on the previously published EightQueens Plus  page.  Just scroll down to the addendum section.