Did you know that it is the 50th anniversary of the BASIC programming language today? (1st May) No? Well why not!  BASIC is the language that brought computers to the mainstream.  Back in the day, if you had a computer, you learnt how to program it in basic.  Infact, when you switched it on, that’s what you were presented with.  These computers wanted to be programmed. Thousands of people purchased these expensive computers purely to learn how to program them. I figured I should do something to mark the an[...]

Tomas Petricek posted an article recently about how he used F# to solve a puzzle he had been given for Christmas.  This reminded me of several similar mini-projects I have developed in the past, the most recent being a program to help solve a specific sort of puzzle in the game Puzzle Quest, which I shall now describe. Puzzle Quest is a match-3 game, with various game modes.  One game mode in particular, “Capture”, has a specific layout of tiles which can be matched in a certain way to leave no tiles behin[...]