Breaking the 3-Colours Granny Square Code.....

Hi to everyone! Has anyone missed me??

The past few months I have disappeared from the blogland because, I have a very heavy schedule  working on my undergraduate project in photonic crystals! 

The today post is about a program that me and A made, for computing the different colour arrangements of granny squares!

And how this idea came to our minds? Well, yesterday, Robin from Crochet Nirvana,  asked me:

''I have 14 colors of thread and I'm making 3 color granny squares.
How many color combinations are there (including various order combos ie: (red, blue, green), (blue, green, red), (green, blue, red) etc...)''

And then thought, why not making a program that not only computes that number, but also  writes down all these different combinations? Of course the program will work with  any desired number for the colours of thread! So, we immediatelly started cooperating and made a  Fortran program which can be found in the following adress:

https://sites.google.com/site/angelikisplace/GRANNY_SQUARES.rar

 Now a few instuctions:
Once you click on the above address, a new blank tab opens and the following message appears on your screen:

Unfortunately, it's written in greek but it's easy to see that the second option 'Save File' is checked. Once you save the file on  your computer,  unzip the folder Granny_Squares. In this folder, there's a .exe file which is the program we made. Double click on it and the following command line appears:

Now let's say you have 5 colours of thread, you write 5 and then press enter.

 The number of different arrangements appears on the screen and the GRANNY_SQUARES.TXT file is created in the GRANNY_SQUARES folder. This txt file can be opened with any editor and looks like this:

 The 60 arrangements are printed in the txt file (In this tutorial I show you only the first 23)

 You can give any number of colours, you want, then run the program and see how many different granny squares you can make! Have fun!!!

***The new updated ver2.0,  includes the combos for a 3, 4 and a 5 square. You can check it out  here****

Please, leave me a message, telling me how you found the program, in which crochet project it helped you, or report me any bugs!