Christmas Cracker?

[Geoff Power]

The coming Christmas break promises endless hours of boredom (for me at
least), being as polite as I can manage to the out-laws etc.

What I crave is some mental stimulation, like I used to get from my old BBC
Basic, when Micro User set the odd programming challenge, where a logic
puzzle could be solved by a few lines of basic code.

You know the sort of thing ... "7 towns have between them 5 roads, 3
railways and 4 buses : what's the shortest number of stops .... etc etc" -
the puzzles usually have about 27 million permutations, which the BEEB took
about 3 hours to solve.

So, can anyone suggest a source for this type of puzzle (preferably with
answers) which will help me to see if a Pentium P2 really is an improvement
on the 2772 (or whatever it was). And also see if I can remember the
rudiments of programming!

Replies (ie web sites, publications or actual examples) will be welcomed by:

geoff...@ndirect.co.uk

... otherwise, I'll end up talking to the brothers-in-law again ...
AAAAAAGGGGHHHHH!!!

[Gerry Quinn]

In article <36702...@news.netdirect.net.uk>, "Geoff Power" <geoff...@nospam.co.uk> wrote:
=>The coming Christmas break promises endless hours of boredom (for me at
=>least), being as polite as I can manage to the out-laws etc.
=>
=>What I crave is some mental stimulation, like I used to get from my old BBC
=>Basic, when Micro User set the odd programming challenge, where a logic
=>puzzle could be solved by a few lines of basic code.
=>
=>You know the sort of thing ... "7 towns have between them 5 roads, 3
=>railways and 4 buses : what's the shortest number of stops .... etc etc" -
=>the puzzles usually have about 27 million permutations, which the BEEB took
=>about 3 hours to solve.
=>
=>So, can anyone suggest a source for this type of puzzle (preferably with
=>answers) which will help me to see if a Pentium P2 really is an improvement
=>on the 2772 (or whatever it was). And also see if I can remember the
=>rudiments of programming!
=>

Okay, here's a problem for you: write a general solver for these
puzzles!

- Gerry

----------------------------------------------------------
ger...@indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
----------------------------------------------------------