Solvers

Build a board from nothing, breaking ties by where pieces tend to sit in the strong boards we already have. It reaches a high score with no starting board to copy.

Build a board from scratch, ranking each next piece by three signals learned from past strong boards. Reached 460 in a board family no earlier search had cracked.

A faint compass for a from-scratch search: nudge it to commit the rare pieces early, where they're needed. It doesn't raise the ceiling; it makes the search reliably reach the top of its own range.

Read every strong board to find the habits that quietly hold a board back, then break them. This experiment produced the project's best board: 463 of 480.

Run the same beam search across nine different scan orders, so it lands in different regions instead of always converging to the same one. The zigzag order found a brand-new 458 board.

Fix a perfect border, then search the interior with the border's edges treated as hard constraints from the very first cell.

Decide in advance not when a board may break, but where: confine every mismatch to a chosen shape of cells, and search for the best shape.

Throw hundreds of cheap short searches at the board, keep only the deepest starts, and promote the survivors through longer and longer rounds.

Tile the board into small blocks, solve each one to proven optimality, and glue them together, paying for the seams instead of forbidding them. From scratch, with no record to copy, it reaches 448.

Build the whole board from scratch with no pre-set frame, in stages, letting the border emerge last from whatever pieces are left.