FORTH GO

Our neighborhood picnic featured a cardboard boat race that drew six entries. All boats were constructed on the spot from cardboard, duct tape and two styrofoam noodles. I thought they would turn soggy and sink in seconds, but most held up pretty well. Stability was the main problem. The lower boat in the first photo capsized quickly, but the simple sled design of the upper boat held up great.

The bottom boat in the second photo was even narrower and capsized almost immediately. The upper boat did well, except the sides were too tall for the kids to effectively paddle.

I’ve finally gotten the Sudokit code together enough to make it available. You can download the zipped source and an executable jar file. The app and the code are both still ugly, but I’ve added a text entry field to make it halfway usable.

There is no documentation. The app is just an experimental solver, trying to mimic human solving techniques and providing a rating for a puzzle’s difficultly. Several puzzles are included to pick from or you can enter your own. The solver has some advanced techniques, and while there are some test puzzles in the “database” that it can’t solve, all newpaper-level puzzles can be solved with only the simplest techniques.

That was the thesis from my original investigation: that if applied methodically, only simple techniques are required to solve newspaper-level problems. The simple techniques being hidden single and naked single. Knowing that, I thought I would test the thesis on a “hard” puzzle from a recent Saturday paper. I couldn’t solve it by hand with the simple methods and had to use some of the subset-based techniques.

Wanting to try that puzzle with Sudokit was enough to get me to add the text entry field (and the log panel at the bottom). Sure enough Sudokit was able to solve it with just the simple techniques. Either I wasn’t methodical enough or Sudokit’s logic is implicitly using more advanced techniques.

I attended the RTP No Fluff Just Stuff conference over the week-end. It was mostly focused on Java and web development, which is not my realm these days, but it gave me a chance to learn new things, and there was some general software development content as well.

The speakers were all top-notch, and, surprisingly, every one of the five or six I saw used a PowerBook. They used Keynote for slides, iTerm for commands, and usually FireFox for web. Most used TextMate for coding, except one used IDEA and one used Eclipse.

Highlights: David Geary presented JavaServer Faces as a better Struts, though most speakers in the panel later didn’t seem to think too much of it. Dave Thomas ran a Ruby track, most of which I attended. I finally got some real details on JavaScript from Glenn Vanderburg’s talk. Andy Hunt’s talk on right-brain thinking for programmers was intriguing, but I was only able to attend the first part of it. He recommended Whole New Mind by Dan Pink.

The food and service were very good, but the rooms were uncomfortably cold. I wore more and more clothes each day, but it still wasn’t enough.