Overview

This is a script to find solutions of the Brainvita puzzle by brute force.

This code is not optimized. It just explores all possible optoions at every stage until a solution is found. If a solution is not found, it backtracks and goes down a different path. It keeps doing this until the target number of solutions are found.

If you run this with a compute_solutions flag, then it computes the solutions and writes the solutions to solutions.json file. The next time you run it without the compute_solutions flag, it just reads the solutions off the file. You can provide a solution number to be shown to you visually.

If you run this without the compute_solutions flag, and there is no "solutions.json" file to read from, then the tool computes the solutions and creates the file.

How to run

Just run it as below

python3 find_solutions.py

By default it stops after 100 solutions are found. The solutions are written to solutions.json. It is just an array of arrays. Each sub-array is a solution, and each dict within the sub-array is a move. The structure of the file is given below. A move is a dict containing the (zero indexed) row and column number of the marble to be moved and the direction it is to be moved in,.

[
    [        
        {
            "row": 0,
            "col": 2,
            "direction": "down"
        }
    .
    .
    .
    ],
    [
        {
            "row": 0,
            "col": 4,
            "direction": "down"
        },
    .
    .
    .
    
    ]
]

Once the file is ready you can view any solution that you want with a command like this:

python3 find_solutions.py --solution_num 55