MaplePrimes - Maplesoft Blog - Posts by Paul DeMarco

Paper Models of 3D Plots

Paul — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 22:41:50 Z

3D Paper Physical Model

Using Maple 15 to Solve a Peg Board Puzzle Game

Paul DeMarco — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 19:27:01 Z

In high school I was briefly fascinated by a triangular "jump all but one" game, commonly found at Cracker Barrel restaurants. The basic premise is that any peg can "jump" over an adjacent peg to occupy the empty hole next to the jumped peg. The jumped peg is then removed. The goal is to continue jumping pegs until there is only one left.

The instructions on the face of the Cracker Barrel version of this game say, "LEAVE ONLY ONE -- YOU'RE A GENIUS". Wanting to claim the right to call myself a genius, unlike ordinary kids, who might just play the game a few times, I sat down on my Turbo-XT and started writing BASIC code. The algorithm I came up with ran a bit slow, so I directed output to my printer and let it run over night. In the morning the program was still chugging along. I advanced the paper feed on the dot-matrix lineprinter -- the kind that used continuous feed paper with perforated edges and holes on each side. Into view came 3 solutions represented by a string of numbers. A quick check verified that I was now a genius.

Lucky 13??

Paul DeMarco — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:06:49 Z

The Canadian Press reported last week the fortune of 13 women working on the 13th floor of an Edmonton bank tower winning a $50-million lottery jackpot. Combine this with the recently released version 13 of Maple and one might claim that notorious number 13's luck is changing.

Early in the development of Maple 13 the question of whether to use "13" was raised. From Apollo 13 to hotels with a missing floor, superstition surrounds this number. Microsoft Office 2010 is slated to be released as version 14.0; the previous version was 12.0. Corel's WordPerfect Office marketed their version 13 as "X3" -- combining a roman numeral and decimal digit.