IZZI Tile Solver

One day a puzzle called IZZI showed up at a North Coast Puzzle Club meeting, and the club has been playing it ever since. IZZI is sort of a jigsaw puzzle consisting of 64 square cardboard tiles. On the tiles are different arrangements of black and white triangles, and the goal is to form the tiles into an 8x8 square lattice where the edges on all sides of all the tiles (except the edges forming the outside border) match colors. There are a large amount ("zillions" according to the manufacturer) of solutions, but it's surprisingly tough to find even one in the 2 hours or so of our puzzle club meetings (so far, no one has solved the puzzle). However, working with an AI agent, Bob was able to write a tool that solves the puzzle in less than a second, and give multiple solutions, which are displayed as tiles. This is a great example of how computers can really help to solve puzzles, so that you can think about other things associated with the problem, such as, in this case, whether a certain pattern can be created, how many solutions there are, or just checking a human solution. Being in the jigsaw puzzle genre brings up the possibility of solving other kinds of jigsaw puzzles with simple computer tools, which Bob is pursuing.

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