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brianberns 10 days ago  [ - ]

Thanks! I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who went down this rabbit hole. :)

I considered parallelizing my solution as well, but the problem is that it only gives a linear speedup, while the problem space increases exponentially. I decided to focus on pruning the search tree instead, and that seemed to work pretty well (after much thinking).

prb 10 days ago  [ - ]

It's getting crowded down here in the rabbithole... One more to peek at: https://github.com/prb/pips-solver/blob/main/README.md

tzs a day ago  [ - ]

  Last updated 2025-10-27.
  [...]

  The puzzles with the most solutions are:


  • 2025-09-15 hard: 2,764,800 solutions
  • 2025-10-05 hard: 344 solutions
  • 2025-09-30 hard: 110 solutions
  • 2025-09-04 hard: 86 solutions
  • 2025-08-23 hard: 80 solutions
Hah...it's like the NYT was just waiting for you to update so they could immediately release a puzzle that makes your list out of date. 2025-10-28 hard has 166 724 solutions.
munchler 10 days ago  [ - ]

That's great! Your experience with the 2025-09-15 and 2025-10-14 puzzles was very similar to mine, I think. I'm impressed that you were able to get AI models to solve this game effectively. I coded it the old-fashioned way myself, mostly, with occasional help from Gemini Pro.

prb 10 days ago  [ - ]

I did write the spec first — data model, algorithm, etc. That may have helped the agents get traction.