Etudes for programmers

Preface vii
1 What's It All About, Alfie?
   or How to Use This Book 1
2 The Game of LIFE
   or Cellular Automata and Computer Graphics 5
3 Why Is the Ocean Blue, Daddy?
   or Map Coloring by Exhaustive Search 8
4 Printer's Devil
   or Automatic Text Formatting 11
5 Winning Is the Only Thing
   or Tournament Design and Evaluation 20
6 Strike It Rich
   or Business Management and Computer Simulation 24
7 Kriss-Kross
   or Puzzle Construction Using Heuristics 30
8 Theseus
   or Automatic Creation of Mazes 32
9 Know Thyself
   or Programs that Print Their Own Sources 34
10 Yielding Up Its Gold
   or Calculations of Investment Yield 36
11 YeSouleofWitte
   or Textual Redundancy and File Compression 39
12 A Sense of Community
   or Bookkeeping for Home Use 43
13 Touring Turing
   or Simulation of a Turing Machine 45
14 Games Computers Play
   or A Computer Strategy for Kalah 49
15 Prime Time
   or Searching for Patterns Among the Primes 59
16 Gas Pains
   or A Gasoline Usage Computation 62
17 Shocking Statistics
   or Highway Traffic Simulation 64
18 Readin', 'Ritin', and 'Rithmetic
   or Construction of a FORMAT Scanner 67
19 Patience Is a Virtue
   or Solitaire Statistics Collection 72
20 Poly Wants a Cracker
   or A Symbolic Algebra Package 77
21 Perverse Inverse
   or Errors Using Floating Point 82
22 Pi Are Square
   or High-Precision Arithmetic Routines 85
23 Mastermind
   or Optimal Strategies for a Guessing Game 95
24 A Code of Dishonor
   or Mathematical Cryptanalysis 98
PROJECTS FOR COMPILER COURSES 105
25 Computer Stimulation
   or Simulation of a Typical Large Computer 107
26 EC Loader
   or A Linking Loader 124
27 Easy Does It
   or A Compiler for an Algebraic Language 132
28 Off the Beaten TRAC
   or Building a TRAC Interpreter 148
SOLUTIONS 159
29 Map Coloring Made Easy
   or A Complete Problem Solution 160
30 Compressed Solutions
   or A Program for Text Compaction 174
Index 197