Pentomino puzzle: our icon, our puzzle
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This is a unique puzzle for Brush. It’s not just that we’ve used it as an icon for our puzzle-solving capabilities. No, we actually have solutions for this one. In fact, we have 17,084 solutions. It takes an average person up to an hour to find even one solution. How did we find them all?
You may not know, but Brush Technology started as a family business. The patriarch of the family, Bruce Hoyt, was one of those sought-after clever cookies who figured out how to program a room-sized mainframe using punch cards without being trained. Solving this puzzle was one of those early punch-card programs. Here is a tribute to his achievement.
There’s a bit of a story with this one. The first punch card program wasn’t so efficient. The computer operator ran his punch cards through in their timeslot one night, but it didn’t find even one solution. At the next opportunity Bruce improved the algorithm and ran it through again. This time it found two or three solutions.
But was he happy with a solution? Oh, no: he wanted all of them. Improvement became a permanent hobby. As computers advanced, so did his algorithm. Each port to a new CPU and language also saw an improved algorithm.
Now the algorithm is about as fast as you could think to make it. It places the pieces in 90 million possible places, and thus finds all possible solutions. And it does so in a mere 8.6 seconds on my 1.8GHz pentium. It actually takes longer to display the puzzles (an extra 30 seconds) than to find them! Let us know if you'd like to know more about it.
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