Sunday May 13, 2001
May 6,2001: It's been one of those weeks with a not much to show for it. I'm working on a Tangram program and a Solar position programs - figured a couple of days for each. Well, a couple of days barely scratched the surface. Maybe next week. In the meantime here's one examining an excellent Bad DNA Theory, prompted by a book I'm currently reading. After Francis Crick and his associate, James Watson, came up with the double helix explanation for the structure of DNA, Crick developed this theory to explain why the 64 three-letter words formed by the 4 bases (A,C,G,T) would only produce the 20 existing amino acids. A 25 line Delphi program illustrates the theory. Brilliant, simple, and elegant, ... but wrong! The book, by the way, is "Genome" by Matt Ridley. I'm finding it a fascinating read.
May 9, 2001: Tangram1 was posted today. It's a partial version of the classic Chinese Tangram puzzle. A square cut into 7 pieces is to be reassembled to match a given figure outline. In this version, the pieces are defined and can be moved and rotated to form figures. There's even an option showing the original square figure as a pattern. (But assembling the square without the pattern can be a challenge the first time you try it.) Flipping of pieces and figure handling are still to be completed.
If you are just interested in playing with a finished Tangram, I recommend Professor Mark Overmars' excellent version available here.
May 13:2001: Here is
Tangram
2, the "final" version of the Tangram
puzzle.
A challenging project based on a
version
written by Dr. Mark Overmars, University of Utrecht, NL.
His version is better than this one (It includes an Editor
to build new figures and a Help file!). But mine runs
the same figure files and includes Delphi source (of
course). A good exercise in Computational
Geometry, a field I didn't even know existed until
last week. There are close to 1000 lines of code here,
so plan on spending several lunch hours if you want to
understand how it works.
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