Talk:Mutagen Puzzle

multiple solutions for the puzzle

There are multiple solutions possible. For instance, adding an atom that doesn't do anything. For this page's example, there's a shorter solution available:

Io-3 Io-2 Echo-1 Io-3 Solis-2 Io-1

Are there some boundaries on solution's length? I can see that a naive depth-first search (even with epeli's pruning method) chokes on lengths between 6 and 8. I assume that my computed solution has the shortest length, given iterative deepening. Maybe there's some unused optimization in depth-first that I could take into account. sthalik (talk) 12:31, 3 December 2018 (CST)

Actually what problem does this puzzle generalize to? Is it just graph search like I'm naively assuming right now? sthalik (talk) 12:41, 3 December 2018 (CST)

I found a working solution! Do it depth-first assuming no cycles BUT as depth limit is reaches, reset it to zero, clear cycles bitmask, and decrement ncycles. Only stop once ncycles is zero. sthalik (talk) 16:47, 3 December 2018 (CST)