scanning ruby-lang.org, i may have overlooked the section i most wanted to find: small, interesting problems worked-through in ruby and used to explain how ruby programmers think about what they do. although i haven't yet begun to write code in ruby, i watch this newsgroup hoping for posts of the form: here's an interesting problem ... here's how i approach it in ruby ... here's the code ... for years, we in the k programming community have sought to include frequent 'how-to' posts. code-sharing in the form of libraries is fine, but *idea* sharing is both more interesting and more valuable. i was hoping that my previous post on the solitaire algorithm would stimulate an attack on the problem by one of the ruby- meisters. it's a simple enough problem, and presumes no knowledge of cryptography. the website www.counterpane.com/solitaire.html contains both perl and python implementations (and my own, in k, can be found at www.kx.com/technical/contribs/stevan). good hunting ...