Reduce the search
Pruning, propagation, invariants and necessary conditions: everything that throws away hopeless states before the search wastes time on them.
Why it's hard
finding
Why a faster computer doesn't help
finding
Why 479 is impossible
finding
Forbidden patterns
finding
No forced moves
finding
The puzzle has no height function
finding
The hard region you cannot design away
finding
Constraint immediacy: every fill order pays the same 480
finding
Piece theft, where solvers die
finding
Where you place the hints beats how many
finding
Linking the clues early does not help, it hurts
finding
The frame is not the basin: a different border does not open a different high board
finding
The border balance
Build a solver
The lab
experiment
CSP presets, measured
finding
Making a beam producer 10x better: the answer is width
page
The DFS study
page
What the DFS study found
page
The hint study
page
How the hint study is built
page
What the hint study found
page
The repair study
page
What the repair study found
experiment
LODESTONE
experiment
A sound colour-counting prune for break-tolerant search
finding
Reading a row's future in its leftover pieces