Comment by Jonathan Barman

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 52

I am feeling quite cross about the above solution for the tree problem. I have been helping out Vector production by typing up the Zark articles. When I typed up the previous Zark issue I did not have this issue, so I had to create my version of the TREE function so that I could include a picture of the result. My first version of TREE was very similar to the one above and took about ½ hour to complete. I then noticed that blanks had been removed so that the boxes were placed as close together as possible. The following shows the differences between the solution in this issue and the example result in the previous issue:

I found solving the blank removal problem really tough and it took me several hours to complete. I was quite looking forward to seeing how Zark had solved the problem, and was really annoyed to find that they had not provided a solution which exactly matched the original challenge.

Comment by Jon Sandles: I can only apologise to Jonathan for not passing on both articles at the same time! Still, it obviously gave him a good challenge! More seriously, I would like to thank Jonathan for typing these articles up, I am sure you all agree he is doing a great job. The question for Zark is: How did they produce those trees in the original article? Did they really cheat and not bother solving the problem until the next issue, and did they really then adjust the problem to make the solution easier?