What's New - May 2003
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May 31, 2003: Just enough time to squeeze in one more program for this month. The Counterfeit Coin program solves, or lets you solve, an old coin weighing problem with several variations. The problem is to use a balance pan scale to identify the bad coin from among 12 by its weight being different from the other 11 . The most challenging version is to solve the problem in three weighings and to identify whether it is light or heavy when that fact is unknown. It's not surprising that author/mathematician Martin Gardner is responsible for the algorithms implemented here.
May 26, 2003: To DelphiForFun newsletter subscribers who received two "test" emails today: Let me apologize for the rookie system administrator at our DFF host site, M6.net, who decided to test and see if my newsletter list was working after some problems last week. I have notified him using several exclamation marks that that is not a wise thing to do!!!! Perhaps he got the message - he did send an apology (just to me I hope).
May 23, 2003: Whew! Life has been hectic for the past two weeks. A root canal, granddaughter's birthday, MathCounts promotion, and a crashed computer have left zero programming time recently. Things are slowly getting back to normal.
I did want to let any interested viewers know that the MATHCOUNTS national finals will be televised on television station ESPN on May 29th at noon Eastern Time. MATHCOUNTS is an organization that sponsors math competitions for 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students here in the USA. We are trying to get the program established in our county schools next fall. You can check it out at http://mathcounts.org
May 11, 2003: Our Olympic
tennis coach is faced with the problem of quickly replacing his
team (all received minor injuries in a plane crash!).
He needs to rank the 8 substitutes as quickly as
possible. This puzzle is from the "Puzzling
Adventures of Doctor Ecco", Dennis Shasha, Dover Books.
You can read the rest of the puzzle and and download the
program that will let you or the computer solve it over at The Coach's Dilemma page.
May 5, 2003:
It's been a long while since we posted a new Beginner's
program. Here's one with about 30 lines of user code
that finds the only positive integer that is equal to the sum of
the 6th powers of its digits. The number would fit on
a T-Shirt so we'll add it to our numeric T-shirt series, and call
it T-Shirt #6.