Simple LabVIEW Puzzle Challenge

[ShotSimon]

altenbach,

This works up to about 28 lines, with disable word wrap and horizontal scroll (property node) and vertical scrolls in place.  I discovered a while back that the string control has an upper limit to the number of characters you can put on one line.  With a picture node and text you could go much farther.  But very slick code either way.  -SS

[altenbach]

Yes, if you leave out the string and just count the number of digits for each line, it gets "difficult" at around 60 lines. Of course the code could be optimized quite a bit to avoid these constant array resizing operations.

Here's the array size as a function of [i] using basically the current code with the string parts deleted.

You get some interesting variations if you start with a different number in the first line. 😉

Message Edited by altenbach on 10-10-2008 02:57 PM

[BruceAmmons]

I've been lurking in the background watching this thread since I found out about it.  Now I am ready to make a contribution.

I have attached an image puzzle I generated using LabVIEW.  You won't need LabVIEW to solve it, though.

Here's your only hint:  Print it, the bigger the better!

Of course, you shouldn't post the solution to the puzzle.  Let everybody think about it for a while...

Bruce

[ShotSimon]

Bruce Ammons,

Sounds good we will make this one Puzzle #11

[ShotSimon]

Bruce Ammons,

That is a fun addition.  You just made me think of another one.  I can just image some guy pulling the E-Size plot off the plotter right this minute  -SS

[Darren]

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Bruce Ammons wrote:

Of course, you shouldn't post the solution to the puzzle.  Let everybody think about it for a while...

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I think I got it.

-D

[Mathan]

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Let everybody think about it for a while...

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I think I got it.

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I think i also got it.

[Gabi1]

here is a list of interesting puzzles, that need some programming for solving.

http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems

[BruceAmmons]

DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU HAVEN"T TRIED BRUCE'S PUZZLE YET!!!

SPOILER ALERT!!

Here is some background to my puzzle:

I first saw this at a science museum many years ago.  It was a display demonstrating perspective, I believe.  It was a box with a cone inside it.  In the first window, you could see the cone from the side, and everything was highly distorted.  In the second window, you could see the cone looking at the tip and everything was very clear.  My wife, a science teacher, made a comment that it would be a neat example for her classes.  I thought "I could make one of those!!  How difficult could it be??"  This was probably 10-15 years ago, so I ended up doing a bunch of math and coordinate transformations to map a flat circle onto the surface of a cone.  I actually wrote a HPGL program for my laser printer to plot.  After generating the cone template, we realized it made a pretty cool puzzle as well.  If you don't think in 3-D, it can be a challenging puzzle.

This version was generated using LabVIEW and the Vision module.  I wrote a program that loads an image and lets you draw a circle on the image.  This circle is mapped to a new image by keeping the same radius but dividing the angle by a constant factor.  Using a factor of 4 generates the puzzle with a nice amount of distortion and it fits nicely in a square area, making it ideal for printing.  After settling on a factor of 4, I optimized the mapping by stepping through each pixel in the destination image and calculating the matching pixel coordinates in the original image.

At one point, I included a circle around the image, but that made it way too easy to figure out.  If you want to make a nice cone for displaying, you could use a compass to draw a circle centered on the upper left corner of the image, then cut on the circle. 

Technically, the program works on almost any image.  Most things don't really make a very good puzzle because they are clearly recognizable even when highly distorted.  It did do interesting things to a picture of my face, though.

Bruce

DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU HAVEN"T TRIED BRUCE'S PUZZLE YET!!!

SPOILER ALERT!!

[ShotSimon]

Bruce,
 
Thanks for the background on that puzzle.  Projections are a real interesting area of math and I too have previously been fascinated by them.  One particular example comes to mind.  I had done some work with GPS and vehicle mapping at work and was asked given two different coordinates in latitude and longitude how many meters apart were they.  My first reaction was too use standard 3D geometry and knowing the radius of the earth calculate it.  But this doesn't work.  Keep in mind this is 10 years before Google Earth but Microsoft Teraserver was very prevalent.  This is where I came across a gold nugget of a book by Snyder, J. P.  (1982).    
 
It turns out this book explains the math behind approximately converting the ellipsoid shaped earth (shaped like an apple) to a flat meter based map.  Along with many other really amazing map projections.  You could also Google UTM to WGS84 or visa -versa.  There are many amazing projection and many that have yet to be discovered.  I ended up doing the projection equations with a formula node in LabVIEW and it worked out great for plotting info on meter based maps. 
 
Thanks again for sharing,
 
-SS