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

[barakta]

My dad got into Googlewhacking and our response was 'why don't you code up a solver' as he did used to be a programmer. Scarily he seems to enjoy the process of manually solving them, almost iterating the program himself. He's had Tantrixes and other computer solvable games as presents for years and plays with them for weeks noting his results on backs of envelopes before getting bored of them. They do sudoku as well.

Then again this is a man who deliberately signs up (or at least doesn't avoid it) for spam, sets it to come in to an old email address in Outlook Express and then sorts it manually by hand and gets all fascinated by the categories.