Tuesday, March 10, 2009

KenKen Solver

This is a Silverlight 2.0 solver for New York Times styled KenKen puzzles (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/crosswords/kenken.html).
The new code (0.2 Beta) is hosted on Codeplex here: http://kktools.codeplex.com. But you don't want the code, you want the solver. I figured out how to host it so here it is:


Instructions:
Select a group on the left so it turns yellow.
In the text box, enter the total (for example, the "3" in "3+").
In the drop-down list, select the operand (the "+" in "3+")
Now, click on the cells in the grid to add them to the group.
If you make a mistake, click the cell again to remove it from the group, or select a different group and "paint" over the old group for that cell.

Shortcuts: Ctrl+G creates a new group. Up/Down arrow keys move between groups, and you can type the operand (+,-,*,/ or "space bar") in the text box next to the total instead of selecting it from the drop-down list. That will help when you do an 8x8 puzzle.

Notes: 8x8 solutions may take about a minute. You do not have to fill in every group (try clicking Solve with a blank 4x4 board), but you should expect to wait a long time with an incomplete 6x6 board, possibly forever with an incomplete 8x8 board.

Friday, March 6, 2009

FP!!!

Wow. This is my first post. So it's John in the cloud. Seattle is all cloudy. And I'm all computery. And computers are moving to the cloud. Yeah? Anyway, I have been tooling around with a KenKen solver and I just posted up the alpha release on CodePlex, the MS version of SourceForge. I hope I keep improving it (8x8 was just release on NYTimes and i have only done 6x6 and 4x4 so far). Right now, you have to download the zip file to run it, which sucks (open TestPage.html). I am trying to find free hosting for it.