What's New -  April 2004

[Home]

 

April 25, 2004:   This week's offering is the Missionaries and Cannibals river crossing puzzle.   (That name is more popular than  "Cannibals and Missionaries"  by about a 3 to 2 margin according to Google.)    No animated graphics, but it does allow user play and of course the program can find all 4 solutions in a few milliseconds.
   

April 16, 2004:  One of the neat things about running this website is hearing from people around the world.   While I was busy hiding and (and finding) Easter eggs this week, an email came in  from a German fellow who is teaching English in China!   He's using the Scrolling LEDs program to present vocabulary but wondered if the program could be modified to save his font and text settings from run to run.   Sure -  it's done Hans!      

April 7, 2004:  Here's a Scrambled Pie puzzle generator/solver.  Given four words, all missing the same single letter, find the letter and unscramble the words.  Mensa® Calendar owners will already have struggled with these.  The program will generate puzzles simple enough for me to solve up to those that I would think are nearly impossible.    And some, like the sample shown here that look simple but may be tough.

We're off to spend Easter week with the Alabama kids & grandkids so I'll see you in week.  

April 2, 2004:  I decided to provide a print feature in my current puzzle project (Scrambled Pie) and to print the solution upside-down at the bottom of the page.   Using the "divide and conquer" strategy for problem solving, it seemed worthwhile to develop the inverted display and print code first.  Here is Test Inverted Text in the Delphi-Techniques section.  

I included a runtime fix for a Delphi 5 "bug" along the way -  "hard" line breaks inserted into memo text at design time.   Guess I should go check D7 and see if the problem still exists.  But maybe if I procrastinate a while, some alert Delphian will send me feedback.