Title

Efficient Solving of Birds of a Feather Puzzles

Roles

Student Authors

Connor Berson ’21, Gettysburg College

Jivan Kharel ’21, Gettysburg College

Ryan Smolik ’20, Gettysburg College

Document Type

Conference Material

Publication Date

7-17-2019

Department 1

Computer Science

Abstract

In this article, we describe the lessons learned in creating an efficient solver for the solitaire game Birds of a Feather. We introduce a new variant of depth-first search that we call best-n depth-first search that achieved a 99.56% reduction in search time over 100,000 puzzle seeds. We evaluate a number of potential node-ordering search features and pruning tests, perform an analysis of solvability prediction with such search features, and consider possible future research directions suggested by the most computationally expensive puzzle seeds encountered in our testing.

Comments

Presented at the 33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-19), Honolulu, HI, January 27-February 1, 2019.

DOI

10.1609/aaai.v33i01.33019686

Version

Version of Record

Required Publisher's Statement

This article is also available on the publisher's website.

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