What's New -  February, 2013

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February 1, 2013: Another puzzle from our 2013  "Brain Game" page-a-day calendar.  I worked on this one for about 10 minutes before deciding that a 10 minute program would be more fun and  more likely to guarantee a solution.  It took more like 30 minutes to write No_3_In_A_Row, but it does find the two solutions in less than a second.
 

February 4, 2013: I received a note today from Dieter Stein, creator of the Paletto game I cloned last month.  He liked the program but pointed out that the initial game board setup should not allow adjacent balls or tokens of the same color in the vertical or horizontal direction.  I corrected my program and reposted Paletto Puzzle Version 2.1 today.   

February 7, 2013: PosExTest is a program in our Delphi techniques section that defines and tests a substitute for the Delphi substring search function, PosEx.    PosEx was  not available in versions before Delphi 7. 

February 17, 2013:  If we break an integer, N,  into smaller integer parts which add up to N, the sets of numbers are called Integer Partitions of N.  They have been the subject of study for a few hundred years and are still studied today.  A Google search will lead you down the path of discovery as far as you care to travel.     My Integer Partition Test program, Version 2 was posted today.  In addition counting and generating partitions for integers up to 375, it will generate partitions with a specific maximum value or a specific number of parts.  Interestingly, for a given integer K, the number of partitions of each of the types is the same.  Although it is generally not feasible to list all partitions of even a medium size integer (there are 190 million ways to partition the integer 100),  the program can now calculate the partition  for any position (rank) for any input  number up to 375.  So if you want to know the millionth, or billionth partition of 200, have at it!    

 

February 20, 2013:  It took a while, but a user finally found a bug with the 3-player option in our Four In a Row game.  Retracting (undoing) a move switches forward to the next rather than back to the previous player.  In the 2-player options it didn't matter of course but, with 3-players, trying to undo a move advances to the next player and the "Reset" button is the only way out.   Four In A Row Version 2.3 posted today fixes the problem.