Puzzleicious

[ciphergoth]

I had a lovely Christmas with spikeylady, some_fox, buttonmeup, yerbury and family.

I got given a "Tantrix" puzzle for Christmas as a stocking present. It contains 10 hexagonal tiles; you have to lay the tiles out to create a loop of one colour such that all the edges match up.

Actually solving the puzzles quickly lost my interest, so instead I wrote a program to solve them. Then I got interested in making a nice display of the results. I've now found all 2706 solutions to the 12 puzzles that form part of the set.



For those interested, the solver is in Python, and uses Cairo for drawing.

Comments

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

It's not a very creative solver - pick a tile, then pick a tile (and orientation) to go next, check that all the edges match properly and there's no tile already there where you want to place one, carry on until you close the loop or you don't have enough tiles left to get back to the start, then backtrack. The solution space is sufficently small for this to work, though you have to leave it overnight to get all the solutions.