09-13-2008 11:56 AM
For the knight puzzle, if someone decides to try it, try to tweak your code once your done to solve the following puzzle:
Puzzle #4A Using the knight regular move on the chess board, make it go through every single tile without ever touching the same one twice. It's a simple exercise of recursion but it might be challenging in LabVIEW. I'll give it a thought as well.
Finally, Darren, if you're really into those mind games, I used to play a lot with the "Binary Arts"(now ThinkFun I believe) puzzles. My favorite games in there were Rush Hour (which would be a pretty amazing challenge to solve in LabVIEW) and Lunar Lockout. I wrote a solver in C for that one and it was capable of genrating new challenges as well.
09-18-2008 11:07 AM - edited 09-18-2008 11:09 AM
Was that a tumble weed that rolled by?....
OK Knight's tour is admittedly involved, I recently read that Steve Wozniak solved this puzzle using BASIC so it's certainly doable.
Let's shoot for something fun and easy for Simple LabVIEW Puzzle #5. This one was made famous by Abbott And Costello. Costello manages to prove to Abbot three separate ways that 13 X 7 = 28.
The question is how many other number combinations can be made to follow these same simple rules of revised math and what are they? -SS
09-18-2008 01:33 PM
I'm a little too young to have ever watched the show on TV but it is quite funny! I was also surprised by the number of times their maths are actually right in this problem. I counted 22 when using the numbers [10..99] and [1..9] with the numbers between 10 and 20 being the best candidates. I don't know what the rules would be if we picked higher numbers so I limitted myself there. Thanx for the laugh.
Olivier
09-18-2008 01:50 PM
09-18-2008 02:10 PM
09-18-2008 02:22 PM
Congradulation OlivierL! And what is your prize? Why you get to pick the next Simple LabVIEW #6 challenge. <insert one man clapping>
Remember keep it fairly simple but fun. If you choose not to accept this "prize" the automated system will automatically choose one for you
Again thank you for playing. -SS
09-19-2008 10:33 AM
Simple LabVIEW #6 is about a taxi cab and what is refered to as the Hardy-Ramanujan Number. This is the smallest number that can be expressed, two different ways, as the sum of two cubes.
I'm thinking 15mins tops to solve this puppy Have a nice weekend. -SS
09-29-2008 04:06 PM - edited 09-29-2008 04:07 PM
09-29-2008 06:11 PM - edited 09-29-2008 06:12 PM
I cringe at the orange wires imposed by the "power of three". I prefer the compound multiply node instead, keeping things all blue. 🙂
While Labview does a good job folding your duplicate operations, I would prefer of you would place the constant computations out by a few loops, where the inputs change for the first time. You are also doing twice too many tests (A^3+B^3 vs. B^3+A^3) that's why you need to check for degenerate solutions.
Here's my alternative. (I am still not sure if you are theoretically guaranteed to get the lowest solution this way.)
09-29-2008 07:16 PM - edited 09-29-2008 07:20 PM
... and here's a version that does not use the outer array:
My VIs have built-in error handling and return "0" if you solution is found (e.g. if the upper limit is too low). It is left to the student to figure out why. 😄
(note the Rube Goldberg construct in my previous version. We can remove the "index array" and tap in the the +1 output nearby instead. We need to keep the "index array" if we want to precompute the cubes in the init loop, and thus avoiding duplicate work, e.g. as follows)