Hi all,

I want to let you know about a unique competition for Java programmers. It involves writing an AI controller to play randomly generated Super Mario Bros. levels. You will get a basic package of Java classes that you can use to test and play the game and write your controller around. You can enter the competition for free and win up to $500 if you can beat the other AI agents!

More information about this competition can be found at http://julian.togelius.com/mariocompetition2009/. I'm not affiliated with the organisation of the competition in any way.

It might be nice to set up a DC team and see what we can come up with...

A friend of mine asked me to code a little tool that can take any string of morse code and output all possible translations of it. At first glance this seemed easy enough, but it turns out to be rather tricky and I'm kind of stuck.

To clarify the problem, I will give an example. I use dots (.) and dashes (-) for morse code.

D   O   N  A  T I  O   N
-.. --- -. .- - .. --- -.

Now, to parse this and get the word 'DONATION' is easy, but what if the spaces were left out?

-..----..--..----.

Taking into account that a morse code 'character' can consist of 1 to 7 dots or dashes (letters, digits and punctuation) the problem arises.

What I need is an (recursive) algorithm that can split the string without spaces into all possible groups of substrings, with a maximum length of 7 chars per substring. It will start at some point, for example 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1... and iterate through all possible combinations. In the example given, the first morse code character can be - (T) or -. (N) or -.. (D) or -..- (X).

I realize the number of possibilities will grow very large, but that's not the issue.

EDIT: Please realize that the relative positions of the morse code characters do not change.

So does anybody have an idea? Any ideas are welcome, and sample code is appreciated in any language.