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

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

you should send that to jwz for xscreensaver.

[fuschiafaery.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a very techie way of puzzle solving, I think you got a tad further than most of us would have done :-)

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Heh. Must have been the season for it - d_floorlandmine got a Tantrix too.

[zz]

i wish i were a creative enough programmer to know how to think about such things in computer-solvable terms. :|

[vulture23.livejournal.com]

Of course, my first thought was "Ooh, I'd like to see the code for that..." :)

[bileandvitriol.livejournal.com]

Did you ever do that puzzle that Matt Selby's brother Alex solved?

[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.

[purplerabbits.livejournal.com]

You know, the moment I saw that puzzle in one of Jess's pictures I *knew* you'd do that!

Tantrix

[thekumquat.livejournal.com]

Tchah - they had that in the castle we were in this week and I'd got all of them up to 9, but not the 10 one!

Just a minute - your pic there doesn't have a 4th colour which appears on the last 3 tiles - are you sure you've replicated the puzzle accurately?

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I like your brains.