What's New - February, 2009
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February 22, 2009:
Some programs, even after
they fade away, keep resurfacing. Knight's Tour, a program
that investigates a chess Knight visiting every square on a
chessboard exactly once, is one of those.
Knight's Tour Version 4, adds
the ability to define non-square boards for the tours. The
algorithm used by the program to solve these boards does not seem to
work as well as on square boards though; the 4X7 board image at right
was solved only after 110,000 moves were tried. On a 10x4 board,
no solution was found after a million trial moves. You're welcome
to download the program and try your hand at solving it manually though!
February 13, 2009: Here's a little program to find a schedule of dates meeting specific month-of-year, day-of-month, or day-of-week conditions within a given range of years, especially today, Friday the 13th !
February 12, 2009:
Brute Force uses exhaustive search to solve a surprising variety of puzzles involving integer arithmetic. I started out merely to add the problem from today's Mensa Page-A-Day Puzzle Calendar, which asks you to use the digits 1-9 to complete this form when the equations are evaluated left to right and top to bottom. However, I decided to add support to the program for JPEG files in problem displays when the BMP image file turned out to be 150 Kbytes. The high quality JPEG image displayed here (and in the program) is 24 Kbytes , a significant savings. Brute Force Version 2.2 includes this puzzle and a dozen or so other sample puzzles.
February 10, 2009: One of the last two updates seems to have broken some of the features of our List Large Files utility program which scans a specified drive and displays information about the largest files found.. The file name data was extracted incorrectly when clicking open its folder, and when formatting to create the CSV (Comma Separated Values) file. In any event, Version 3.1 posted today seems to have fixed those problems, hopefully without introducing any new ones J.
February 3, 2009: I am supposed to to be boning up on Delphi for Net concepts, but so far I'm finding lots of frustrations. I just want to read and search a stupid flat file with a server side program to solve the Booksearch problem, but I have to learn SQL to do that? Ugh! I'm finding that too much ADO about not much is a pain in the ASP!
So I decided to write a program from Saturday's Mensa Puzzle-A-Day calendar. Chess Logic Puzzle was a satisfying diversion for a few days. Given a 4x4 board with 6 of the 12 uniquely identifiable chess pieces fixed in place, add the other 6 while meeting a few constraints. Actually not that difficult, but a good programming exercise to automate and animate the solution.