What's New -  October, 2007

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October 29, 2007:  Today's problem is from yesterday's NPR "Car Talk" radio show puzzler:

 In a certain family, each boy child has twice as many sisters as brothers. Each girl child has the same number of sisters as brothers. How many children are there of each gender?

The algebra is not too bad once you convert the words to equations, but I decided to modify BruteForce, a program which uses an exhaustive search from a set of possible integer solution values.  For BruteForce Version 2.1, I added an option to let more than one variable assume the same value.     Sample problem "Brothers and Sisters.prb" is included in the downloadable zip files.

 

October 17,2007: Here is a utility program, HexView, whose sole job is to display the contents of any file.  Computer memory and files consist of binary data (bits) which are generally handled in 8 bit chunks called bytes.     Since most of the 256 possible bytes do not have unique display characters assigned, a hexadecimal (base 16, 4 bits per hex digit)  display is a relatively compact way to show all of the data in a file.   Two hexadecimal digits can exactly represent any byte. 

October 16, 2007:   A viewer recently wrote asking to clarify a problem he was having determining the coordinates where a line from the center of a rectangle at a given angle would exit the rectangle.  Since I'm currently semi-stuck on a more complicated project, it seemed to be a good excuse to take a break and do something simpler.  Ray  Intersecting Rectangle is my attempt to help Joe with his problem and re-boost my confidence that I can  get something to work at least!
 

October 12, 2007:  Version 3 of our Crossword Generator was posted today.  It enhances puzzle generation by centering the initial word and trying up to 1000 random puzzles in order fit the number of words requested.

The puzzle a left  (generated from sample file Continents.txt),  includes all 7 continents.  It was generated on the 10th attempt using "extended search" and would likely not have been found by the previous version