hacker.org

A few details about my solver: It is 4,500 lines of C, about 1,000 are debug code (output of board statistics, printing the board with annotations, writing logs of calculations, consistency checks). The basic idea is to determine and remove infeasible moves, e.g. "the field at y,x will not be e...

I finally solved all 1206 levels. \o/

Use the source, Luke!

I think your suggested approach is infeasible. On the edge one in 32 pieces fit, so about 2 or 3, and in the middle one in 1024 (if you have two neighbours placed), so about 4. So you have multiple pieces to choose from at every place, this is exponential in the number of places. It's easily more co...

Was the increased number of pieces a problem for you, Tron? Not per se, but it in combination with the smaller edges it made it harder: It is four times more likely that another piece fits (1 in 8 instead of 1 in 32) and there are 3.3125 times the number pieces, so there are on average 13.25 times ...

This one was again a good challenge. The missing border, moving the tiles within their pictures and the varying background colours were no problem. What made it quite a bit more difficult is that there are only eight different border patterns, so every eighth piece matches instead of every 32nd as i...

The challenge is not mis-categorised.

The new encoded message is larger than the modulus. This does not make much sense.

I probably wasted an hour looking for my calculation error in decrypting the message. o_O
Ok, back to hacking my Mortal Coil solver. (:

This sounds promising! Do the filenames of the images mean anything? I didn't look into them when the server accepted the solution shown on the image. Now if I only could get the hang of Real Simple Access. I have the decoded number, but I can't make heads or tails of it. I'm afraid that the next ro...

This is a really nice challenge. It's quite clear what to do, but it's not trivial to implement. I wish there were more challenges of this quality!

I calculated the other number. It is not expected as answer and I don't see anything interesting when interpreting the number in other ways. Am I missing the punchline?

The start is at x=9 y=7

This board is solvable.

There is an alternative form for the answer, which is about factor five shorter. Instead of sending every direction change, you only send direction changes at T-crossings and leave them out for corners. This is mandatory from level 1171 onwards, because the web server drops answers longer than 1.000...