The attached add-in is a compendium of three popular “coffee break” puzzles, some or all of which are likely to be familiar to anyone who enjoys playing letters and numbers games either online or in the daily papers. All three modules incorporate the means to set and/or solve the respective puzzles, and to save the results to JMP data sets from where they can subsequently be retrieved and/or analysed further.
Two of them - Wordle and Sudoku - will already be household names to most people. The so-called "Countdown Numbers Game" might perhaps be less familiar to anyone outside the UK, so I've included links to some examples on YouTube of how it's played on the TV game show "Countdown", and have written the same examples into the program itself, from where they can be imported and run. The Sudoku module is a slightly modified version of an add-in I uploaded to the File Exchange some years ago: the actual functionality has changed very little, but the archiving and retrieval of puzzles and their solutions has been given a makeover in line with the same capabilities within the other two modules.
I assembled the add-in for no better reason than that the three components of it were all interesting scripting challenges, and offer the end results to the File Exchange in the hope that they'll provide a few moments’ amusement for anyone who needs an occasional break from their work.
David Rose
Prism Training & Consultancy Ltd
