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