As you may have already heard, in order accelerate the growth of our different product lines, Maplesoft decided to spin off our online education products into a separate company. Let me introduce you to DigitalEd.

DigitalEd will focus on online education technology, including online courseware, testing and assessment, and placement testing (i.e. Möbus, Maple T.A., and the Maple T.A. MAA Placement Test Suite). Maplesoft will continue to develop and support Maple, MapleSim, and their related products, for both academic and professional use.  The two companies will maintain close ties, and Maple will continue to supply the mathematical engine to the DigitalEd product line.

For more information about this change, see https://www.maplesoft.com/digitaled/

You can take a look at the new DigitalEd web site here:  www.digitaled.com.

We have released an update to Maple, Maple 2018.1. This release provides enhancements to the mathematical computation engine, including physics and DEs.  It also provides substantial improvements to the command line version, easier access to group management tools in the MapleCloud, and a few other interface improvements.

This update is available through Tools>Check for Updates in Maple, and is also available from our website on the Maple 2018.1 download page, where you can also find more details.

We have just released a new version of MapleSim.  The MapleSim 2018 family of products offers new tools for developing digital twins, greater connectivity with other modeling tools, and expanded modeling scope. Improvements include:

• New tools for creating motion profiles
• FMI  import for FMI 2.0 Fixed-Step Co-Simulation
• Optimized handling of large models
• Inclusion of temperature effects in the MapleSim Hydraulics Library from Modelon and MapleSim Pneumatics Library from Modelon
• Heat transfer through air and water with the MapleSim Heat Transfer Library from CYBERNET

See What’s New in MapleSim 2018 for more information about these and other improvements.

Just over a year ago, someone asked me if Maple could help them pick names for their family gift exchange, because they were fed up with trying to find a solution by hand that met all their requirements. I knew it could be done, of course, and I spent some time (and at least one family dinner conversation) talking about how to do it. There wasn’t enough time to help my friend last year, but I dusted off my ideas, and my somewhat rusty Maple programming skills, and put something together for this year.

The problem, as stated to me, was “Assign everyone in the group the name of someone else in the group (the person they will buy a present for), with the restriction that no one can be assigned their partner.”

I decided to generalize a bit so that you can specify more than one person in the “do not pick” list for each individual, and the restrictions do not have to be reciprocal. That way, you can use it with rules like “parents cannot pick their children”, or “Elizabeth got Martin two years running, so she can’t pick him again this year”.

Ultimately I went with a “guess and check” approach. For each person, pick a name from the pool of suitable candidates (excluding themselves, anyone on their “do not pick” list, and anyone who has been picked already). Keep assigning names until either everyone has a name, or you end up in a situation where you can’t give someone a name. This can happen, for instance, if Todd is the last name, and the only unmatched name is Catherine, and Todd cannot pick Catherine. If that happens, I tossed all the names back into the virtual hat, gave it a good shake (i.e. randomize()) and tried again. Not as elegant as I would have liked, but it seemed like an effective approach.

It does feel like there ought to be a “nicer” solution. Maybe using graph theory? I know that my code will get into trouble if the restrictions are such that no solution exists.  If anyone has any ideas on other/better ways to solve this problem I’d be happy to hear them (now that I’ve had the fun of solving it myself first!).  

The application can be found on the application center: Gift Exchange Helper. The name picker algorithm is in the start-up code.

Happy gift giving!

We have released a small maintenance update to Maple. Maple 2017.3 provides enhancements in several areas, including mathematical typesetting, pdsolve, and the Physics package. It also provides improvements to the MapleCloud, including a fix for a problem that prevented some Mac users from logging on with their Google credentials.

This update is available through Tools>Check for Updates in Maple, and is also available from our website on the Maple 2017.3 download page.