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| NEXT MEETING | ||||||||||
| The next meeting is on Monday 20th September @ 8pm. | ||||||||||
| I AM A WEAKISH SPELLER | ||||||||||
| It is the in thing
just now to publish your C.V. on the internet. The other
day one came to our attention and were we learned of a
clever piece of software. The chap in question, Mr
William Tunstall-Pedoe MA (Cantab), has an interesting
history. He graduated from Cambridge with a first in
Computer Science. This sparked our interest, for they don't
give those out simply for good attendance. We read on to
see to what use he put this qualification. - He developed a commercial chess-playing program from scratch, Cyber Chess. - Development of Crossword Maestro which breaks new ground in Artificial Intelligence. - GEC Hirst Research Centre. Speech Recognition. - Developed Anagram Genius. Anagram Genius This devilishly clever piece of software developed by Mr. Tunstall-Pedoe creates an anagram from any other word or phrase you enter, for instance Did you know that rearranging the letters of "Clint Eastwood" gives "Old West action", "Madonna Louise Ciccone" gives "Occasional nude income" and "William Shakespeare", "I am a weakish speller"??! Many editions ago GLENCOM Newsletter explained how to create an anagram dictionary. We wonder if Mr.Tunstall-Pedoe got his idea from us? G |
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| MAGIC SQUARES | ||||||||||
| Get
a pencil and paper and draw a 3 by 3 grid. See if you can write the numbers 1 to 9, one in each square such that vertically, horizontally and diagonally they all add up the same number. We will give the answer in the next edition, together with a program which will create much larger magic squares. G Hint: They should all add up to fifteen. If you can't wait till next edition look here. |
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| WINDOWS 95 SE AND FREESERVE | ||||||||||
| With
Windows 98 and Freeserve IE5 running every thing was fine
and working dandy. I then decided to install
Windows 98 SE and it installed on top of and worked
ok. Then along came that time, well you know, that
time that people dread most, clean up time. Format
the C: drive and start again. I decided to
install Windows 98 SE and all things were fine,
everything worked, that is until I tried to install
Freeserve IE5. A nice little message popped up and
informed me that I had a more up to date version of
Internet explorer installed and therefore the install
program would be stopped. No Freeserve, no E-Mail, what do I do. After searching through the files on the Freeserve c.d. I found the file to either set up a new account or to revive an old account and ran it direct. It revived my old account and I could surf the net, very good I though until I found that I could not receive or send E-Mails. After looking at error messages for an hour it was reformat time once again. I installed windows 98, all hardware and drivers, and good old Freeserve. Once again I could access E-Mails and so I installed Windows 98 SE over everything and all is working fine. What’s happening, do you know?, do you care?. It seems to me that the answer is to use the older Freeserve c.d. as it gives much the seem message as the newer version but allows you to carry on and install Freeserve. One other thing, print dir. Do you ever wonder why windows has no print dir command, do you wish to print out directories of your drives (yes please says Bob). I am using a little bat file to add a print option to Windows menus and it works just fine. If anyone is interested in it then please use Onelist and I will send it on with details. I will add that I use it under windows 98 but it should work under windows 95. Someone might like to try it under 95. |
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| THE BOIDS ARE COMING | ||||||||||
| Have
you ever watched a flock of birds, reeling and turning in
the evening sky? Have you ever wondered what mechanism
makes them flock together, flying in formation. Are they
all obeying the commands of the lead bird, or is it a
collective decision to change course at the same time? If
so, how do they agree amongst other? Conway's classic Perhaps the answer is altogether simpler. Anyone who has seen Conway's classic 'game' of Life may get a clue to what is happens happening with birds. In Conway's Life, single-cell life forms are born, survive and die by a set of simple rules. The rules are carried out by a computer program. Shortly after the Life simulation is started the observer can see the cells apparently organising themselves into more complex organisms. The shapes and actions they take are well documented, there are Gliders, Flashers, and even Glider Guns. The Life computer program does not tell the cells to clump together, they do it themselves. Returning to the flock of birds, several researchers have taken the clue given by Conway's game of Life. They have written computer simulations in an effort to explain bird behaviour. One famous example is Boids. This was originally written in pre-Windows days, but there is an up to date example called MatFa's Boids which comes from Sweden. MatFa's Boids is public domain, and comes complete with source code in Delphi. MatFa's Boids MatFa's Boids gives you control over several aspects of bird behaviour; how close they fly to each other, speed, acceleration, turn rate and so on. The Boids website lists several other Boids-type simulations. G |
The Boids website | |||||||||