What's New - November, 2005
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November 21, 2005: Version 2 of the game of Go was posted today. It does a better job of handling removal of multiple connected blocks of stones of the opposite color when a stone is played. And of disallowing "Ko" moves, situations where a a loop could occur with successive plays giving your opponent the same board he faced on his previous turn.
November 13, 2005: I recently received an email from a fellow who plays the solitaire card game known as Roll-Call or "Hit or Miss". It's a simple game but he's played it for many years without winning a game. He wrote wondering about the chances that he would ever win. So here's a simulation program, Roll-Call Solitaire Statistics. that displays the results for several versions of the game. (It's less than 2% chance of winning for his version.) The program also lets you replay winning games, so he can finally have the thrill of winning, even if he has to set up the deck first!
November 11, 2005: I spent a week trying to get a Delphi program that would talk to the ActiveHome CM15A USB X10 Computer Interface. This is a device which can send and receive signals over household power lines to monitor or control other devices (lights, alarms, motion detectors, etc.). The sample code that comes with the ActiveHome SDK (System Development Kit) does not include any Delphi samples and the formats of the messages received just did not seem to match up with what I thought was expected. I returned the device and went back to using an older "Two-way" serial port interface (TW-523) which has worked fine for years. Just thought it might be nice to update the code for a more modern USB interface and to post it here on DFF. Maybe next year. If anyone has had any success with Delphi and the CM15A, let me know.
Another
project has just been posted, an initial version of the Japanese
game of Go. Black and white stones played on a grid.
Surrounded groups of stones are captured and score
points. Like Chess, Go has become a lifelong
study and challenge for thousands of players. I'm not
one of them but did get sucked into the challenge of implementing
simple human to human play. Well, as it turned to be
not so simple, but here's my first version of
the game of Go, bugs and all. Feedback
welcomed.
November 1, 2005: I just updated the utility program, Remove Blank Lines, to fix a minor problem. Minor to fix, potentially major in consequences. Among other tasks, the Delphi procedure CloseFile writes the last buffer to a file being created. But only if you remember to include the statement. Without it, the final record or records from the input file may never get written to the output file. Thanks to viewer/user Tim D for reporting the bug.