vintagegnu / structuresolver

Find solutions to the artifacts puzzle in Structure by seihoukei

StructureSolver

Find solutions to the artifact puzzles in Structure by seihoukei - http://structure.zefiris.su/

These puzzles provide you with a selection of unique two character 'glyphs', which you must construct into a single codeword such that each glyph only appears once.

Please create an issue if you find a set of glyphs that this program cannot solve, there are likely to be more edge cases that I haven't found yet.

Example

Glyphs: DS, LA, JZ, SL, AJ
Solution: DSLAJZ

How to use

Compile

Compile with ghc and run the resulting executable.

Or using ghci

Import the script and use the solve function, which takes a single list of strings as its argument.

GHCi, version 8.6.5: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/  :? for help
Prelude> :l structureSolver.hs
*Main> solve ["DS","LA","JZ","SL","AJ"]
[["DS","SL","LA","AJ","JZ"]]
*Main> :quit

How it works

1. Start by putting each glyph into its own chain.
2. Combine chains together if doing so is unambiguous, i.e. there is only a single candidate to attach to the end, and there are no other chains competing for that candidate.

If there is a single chain left you have a solution, otherwise return the chains you did manage to make (possibly useful to guess before revealing all the glyphs).

Tricky bits

This program has had a few iterations before I added it to github, so to dispell the illusion that it sprang fully formed from my brain the following are things that tripped me up, in hopes of providing more insight into the construction of the current solution.

Symmetrical chains

These are chains that start and end with the same character. These cause issues because they appear to compete with non-symmetric chains, but they should actually just extend them. It might also be the case that multiple symmetric chains of the same character could exist, in which case they would be interchangable and multiple solutions would exist. This scenario might be avoided when the game constructs the puzzle, but I haven't dug into the code so I am unsure.