This program does a brute-force search for solutions for Polarium. It uses some features to eliminate worthless solutions:
- "battle": is looking for solutions covering exactly the same tiles, having the same (current) endpoint, having the last two directions identical. Only keeps the lowest score.
- remove unsolvables: obvious, can be improved for sure.doesn't make use of parity for example.
- remove needlessly complicated: disallow wasting the border. currently missing the special case about edges.
- remove bad starting points: we can safely assume that the starting point always has a "better" row/col - position than the endpoint.
- remove too bad score: don't brute-force through the solutions if we already found the shortest solution, and the score of the current puzzle is bigger than the currently lowest score for a solution.
V6.0.1: bug fixed: program now also finds the shortest solution for stage 34, which involves doing the first step onto a row from outside.