Hexiom Solver

Introduction

Laurent Vaucher proposed solving (and playing) the game programmatically:

• Solving Hexiom (perhaps you can help)
• Sikuli plays Hexiom for me
  

Related pages:

• Hexiom Puzzle by Pierre Schaus on Constraint Programming (Scampi & Scala)
  
• Using an industrial-strength SAT solver to solve the Hexiom puzzle by Hugo Musso Gualandi
  

My attempt

5
    +3 4 3 3+3
    4 4 3 2 4 5
   . 3 3 2 4 4 3
  2 . 2 . . . . 2
+3 4 . . 4 3 5 4+3
  5 4 4 4 4 2 4 3
   3 3 . . . . 3
    5 3 5 4 . 4
    +3 5 4 4+3

The first line contains the size of the level as a single number. Subsequent lines contain the hex tiles, somewhat rotated clockwise. Dots mark empty spots. Plus signs indicate that the next tile is locked, i.e. cannot be moved.

The program can also take a snapshot of the desktop, locate within the random size 6 level in a browser window, and solve it by generating mouse events.

Update: made the program multi-threaded, and added support for Mac OS X (tested on 10.7.3 Lion)!

• hexiom.c the solver, using simulated annealing
  
• scrape.h, scrape.c reading a board from the browser window, character recognition
  
• ui.h, ui.c grabbing a screenshot, creating mouse events
  
• random.h, random.c portable thread-safe PRNG
  
• hexiom.zip archive containing all sources as well as a pre-built Windows binary
  
• hexiom.tar.gz archive containing all sources as well as a pre-built Mac OS X binary
  

Result

See a flash movie showing the program running on Windows (click on image):

February 14th, 2012 by Daniel Hartmeier <daniel@benzedrine.ch>