Solvers and Other Programs for Japanese Puzzle Games

Japanese puzzle games, either those published by the Japanese publisher Nikoli or similar, have become popular in recent years, and I’ve been enjoying solving them on the computer (or sometimes on paper) as well. Like any good programmer, I’ve been asking myself “How can I get a computer to do the hard work for me?” and started working on some solvers for them. This section contains the solvers that I started to work on, or mostly completed.

You can find some good online implementations of these games here:

• The BrainBashers.com Games Page.

• Logic Games Online’s Nurikabe

• Kakuro.com (requires Flash).

• Vegard Hanssens’s Homepage - contains an implementation of many games with numbers.

• Puzzle Light Up and friends - numbered puzzles.

• The Binary Puzzle.

The Programs

ABC Path Solver

Kakurasu Solver

Under Development

Kakuro Solver

A Kakuro solver written in Ruby. Incomplete and a Google search will yield others.

Hitori Solver

A solver for Hitori written in Ruby. Incomplete.

Nurikabe Solver

A solver for Nurikabe written in Perl 5. Still very partial - a good Nurikabe-solving heuristic requires many sophisticated algorithms.

Similar Efforts

This is a list of similar efforts to write automated solvers and automated generators for such games:

• Page about “Nurikabe: Generating and Auto-solving” and its corresponding open-source Nurikabe Garden Java project on SourceForge.net.

• Page about a Kakuro Solver - in Python using PyGame. Does not seem to have a downloadable version.

• Open Source source code for a Kakuro Solver in Python (MIT/X11 Licensed) and a GitHub project for a more restrictively licensed (Affero GPLv3) solver and generator for Kakuro.

• Google search for “sudoku solver” and Duck Duck Go search for “sudoku solver” - many results there (this task appears to be very popular among programmers).

• Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection - solvers and generators for many games.