Great game. My first thought at a solution would be a classic inverse backtrack: start with a full board and work backward.

Note that boards with just one piece missing are solutions (not optimal!) and so are all predecessors to a full board in a path such as you show. So, working back from boards with one empty square (each of the N*N possibilities) one can find optimal starting points (which will be a symmetric family).

If I were still teaching advanced programming, I would probably use this game.

--traveler

In reply to Re: Challenge: Box Blackout by traveler
in thread Challenge: Box Blackout by Limbic~Region

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