I am a modest person, modestly speaking. I go about living day-in and day-out modestly, without realizing even once that people around me are immodest, or not quite modest at the very least. In fact, I learnt recently that the virtue of modesty (yes, it’s still considered a virtue by some) is dying! If you don’t believe me, here’s the modest article about its demise.
As we all know, I am sort of an expert in MATLAB. People come from far and beyond to ask me how they can improve their MATLAB figures, codes and apps. In return, the only thing I ask from them is they start using at least one of my MATLAB programs regularly. And then they never speak to me again or they switch to a ‘Mac’. Anyway, since my daughter has not done either of those two yet, I thought of gifting her a MATLAB program on her 5th birthday.
Surprisingly, she was more receptive of my program (her present, that is) than I had imagined. That felt really good. A week or so well-spent! Perceptive among you may have realized that I made a 6×6 Sudoku Solver (or Sixdoku Solver) for her and it is not just a copy/paste of my well-known (9×9) Sudoku Solver. Well, the logic behind solving a Sudoku is mostly copy/paste. (I was quite surprised how easy it was to recast the logic code for my 9×9 solver to this 6×6 one, proving how good a theoretical physicist I am since generalizing a specific example is what I achieved here!) But the visual layout: the four buttons, the background, the upbeat colours / emojis / messages / texts and the functional aspect of the 6×6 grid are totally new and – as Microsoft likes to put it every so often – built from the ground up! Literally so because the Sudoku Solver is built in GUIDE (will be removed in a future MATLAB release) while Sixdoku Solver in built in App Designer (the default app development environment now).
I won’t bore you with any more details about the program but why Sixdoku? I hear you ask! Because my daughter has been subscribed by her mother to “Young World”, a children supplement from “The Hindu” newspaper, and one of the ‘fun’ activities there is a Sixdoku. I saw them ‘struggling’ to solve it and I thought, “Well, well, well… What have we got here!” and the rest as they say is her present. Some of you familiar with my usual Sudoku Solver may complain that my program does not actually help her solve one on her own. As it is not made with that in mind, for example, if she wants to solve a Sudoku with just the notes it is not so user-friendly in that regard. And that’s why I’m Dharmesh and you are not. As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, the grid has been totally rebuilt from the ground up and it allows writing over the notes to enter a single number. It doesn’t update the notes after that though, but that helps her to learn to remember and see what changes lie ahead. So it not only allows her to solve a Sixdoku on her own, it also ‘teaches’ her to follow the changes in her own mind to solve it faster. (These are not just hypothetical statements. She has indeed explored the functioning of my program by trying to make up her own Sixdokus and trying to solve the proper ones from the Young World on her own after writing the notes.) And that is how one learns to live one’s life.
Talking about living one’s life, I found an inspiring Japanese poem by Kenji Miyazawa about just that topic. What a coincidence, you might say! I will leave you with its Wiki page (with a translation) and a different translation. Pick what you like:
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