[tirutiru]

Ah this is great.

I wrote my own solver in Python+Numba. You've probably seen Robot Reboot https://www.robotreboot.com/challenge. I had a parser that could take a screenshot of the daily puzzles and feed them into my engine. Your post might just give me the kick in the pants to put it up online.

Curious if think this made you better at RR. I started out absolutely terrible, and actually got to the point where I could occasionally match the best scores on Reboot (but not their times of course!).

[kevincox]

I think it has made be better. At the very least it shows some techniques like moving forward and back and highlights some approaches that I missed.

I generally solve the puzzle "backwards", looking at how the robot can approach the goal. So if you miss a possible approach it can definitely result in me missing a solution. Filling these gaps is valuable.

It also provides some intuition about how long puzzles are in different scenarios which helps you decide how to look.

But overall I would say that it is mainly curiosity why I use the solver. It is interesting to know if we actually found the best solution or how often we miss it.