2018-08-29

Nonogram puzzle

An example of a nonogram puzzle

Nonograms, also known as Japanese puzzles, are logic puzzles that are sold by many news paper vendors. The challenge is to fill a grid with black and white pixels in such a way that a given description for each row and column, indicating the lengths of consecutive segments of black pixels, is adhered to. Although the Nonograms in puzzle books can usually be solved by hand, the general problem of solving Nonograms is NP-hard.

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2018-01-03

Solving a Tetris-puzzle with GAs

The puzzle in the picture comes from a Stackoverflow's question (https://stackoverflow.com/q/47858717/3235496)

The general challenge posed is to tile a given region with a given set of polyominoes.

TL;DR

GAs aren't the most appropriate tool for this kind of puzzle. GAs tend to produce good but sub-optimal solutions and this behaviour is acceptable only for some combinatorial optimization problems.

Anyway the last example proposed finds a solution almost always (often in a short time) and GAs prove themselves a general, viable path especially when previous knowledge isn't available.

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