I am making a simple puzzle. I remeber in my youth that I encountered a 9x9 tray where a piece is missing and you have to move around so that the puzzle fits with each other. I’ve made my own variant and it should add all bits randomly. But I have encountered a combo that I cannot solve, either I lack the puzzel knowledge or it’s a variant that cannot be solved.
Please try. It should be 1-9 where the first row is 1,2,3, then 4, 5, 6 (with 5 is gone so it should be empty)
So I used a website to analyse the puzzle before having a crack (didn’t want to waste time if it is not solvable) and it indeed says that this puzzle is not solvable. Sliding Block Puzzle Solver if you want to check it out.
I would suggest you have two options:
Write a test harness that attempts to solve the puzzle after it’s been created randomly, that way you can still create them randomly and then your harness will discard any that can’t be solved.
If that sounds like too much work, you could leverage the website that @PeteMcc linked, submit your generated puzzle, capture the response and use that.
That’s also a good option, I was thinking seeing as he already had a process for randomly generating the puzzle to carry on down that line.
Whichever you choose @Terzom I’d suggest also adding a counter for every move and setting a threshold for how difficult you want the puzzle to be.
It also means you can add difficulty levels in future.
To randomize puzzles like this, you can start with the puzzle in a solved state, and then make a number of random legal moves. That way, solvability is guaranteed.
To keep the puzzle from being too easy, you can constrain these moves, to e.g. make sure you avoid pairs of moves that undo each other, or employ some difficulty metric that stops the randomization when the puzzle is deemed difficult enough.
