> The software search completed in 86 hours on my old 2 GHz Pentium 4 laptop.
This is an old article. Would be fun to see someone write a multithreaded solver and let it run on a modern CPU.
Or, make it a LeetCode problem. Within 24 hours you’d have someone come up with a mind boggling hyper-optimized solution using tricks you didn’t even know existed.
I compiled the code with minor changes on my M3 Macbook Air and it found the 19186 unique solutions in about 3hrs 15min, so ~9.2X speedup (over the 30hrs stated in the post). Would indeed be interesting to see how fast you can go with some optimization.
We got one of those years ago. I had already written a Sudoku solver using Knuth's Dancing Links, so I modified it to find the Bedlam solutions. The program worked mostly but gave duplicates for some of the solutions. It was also fun to develop solution search criteria for placing the pieces, e.g. to get the reds all down one corner.
> The software search completed in 86 hours on my old 2 GHz Pentium 4 laptop.
This is an old article. Would be fun to see someone write a multithreaded solver and let it run on a modern CPU.
Or, make it a LeetCode problem. Within 24 hours you’d have someone come up with a mind boggling hyper-optimized solution using tricks you didn’t even know existed.
I compiled the code with minor changes on my M3 Macbook Air and it found the 19186 unique solutions in about 3hrs 15min, so ~9.2X speedup (over the 30hrs stated in the post). Would indeed be interesting to see how fast you can go with some optimization.
This is not a new solution. This article is from 2008 or earlier.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080704123725/http://scottkurow...
We got one of those years ago. I had already written a Sudoku solver using Knuth's Dancing Links, so I modified it to find the Bedlam solutions. The program worked mostly but gave duplicates for some of the solutions. It was also fun to develop solution search criteria for placing the pieces, e.g. to get the reds all down one corner.