Throughout the course of a year, Maple users create wildly varying applications on all sorts of subjects. To mark the end of 2018, I thought I’d share some of the 2018 submissions to the Maple Application Center that I personally found particularly interesting.

Solving the 15-puzzle, by Curtis Bright. You know those puzzles where you have to move the pieces around inside a square to put them in order, and there’s only one free space to move into?  I’m not good at those puzzles, but it turns out Maple can help. This is one of collection of new, varied applications using Maple’s SAT solvers (if you want to solve the world’s hardest Sudoku, Maple’s SAT solvers can help with that, too).

Romeo y Julieta: Un clasico de las historias de amor... y de las ecuaciones diferenciales [Romeo and Juliet: A classic story of love..and differential equations], by Ranferi Gutierrez. This one made me laugh (and even more so once I put some of it in google translate, which is more than enough to let you appreciate the application even if you don’t speak Spanish). What’s not to like about modeling a high drama love story using DEs?

Prediction of malignant/benign of breast mass with DNN classifier, by Sophie Tan. Machine learning can save lives.

Hybrid Image of a Cat and a Dog, by Samir Khan. Signal processing can be more fun that I realized. This is one of those crazy optical illusions where the picture changes depending on how far away you are.

Beyond the 8 Queens Problem, by Yury Zavarovsky. In true mathematical fashion, why have 8 queens when you can have n?  (If you are interested in this problem, you can also see a different solution that uses SAT solvers.)

Gödel's Universe, by Frank Wang.  Can’t say I understood much of it, but it involves Gödel, Einstein, and Hawking, so I don’t need to understand it to find it interesting.