[vunderba]

You made me chuckle a bit with the whole “hand-made solver” thing with discrete puzzles like this, since 99% of the time to create a new puzzle, you just start with a solved problem (arithmetic equality) and introduce a sequence of random valid moves to put it in a unsolved state.

I remember one of my freshman computer science assignments was to make a Rubik’s Cube game. That was when a lot of undergrads were first introduced to the idea of using a stack and then "unwinding" it to simultaneously build the problem + solution.

[trangram]

yeah, the solver behind Mathstick is pretty much like what you described: building the problem + solution simultaneously, besides you also need to collect the multiple solutions for the same question and information for further classifying the difficulty of a puzzle.

Just like "hand-made" pizza used as a response to the rise of frozen, factory-produced pizza and to establish authenticity against fast-food chains. Maybe "hand-made" will be used to emphasize a app/software is made by human rather than being vibecoded or completely AI generated in the future. Also, if you use the Puzzle Maker to create your own puzzle, it becomes a "hand-made" puzzle :)